The World Bank has hinted that Ghana would benefit from a four-billion-dollar investment in Africa this year. According to the bank, this is part of its Human Capital Project for the year.
This was made known at the bank’s launch of Africa CSO and Parliamentary Development Dialogue series to engage with key civil society organizations around major development priorities in the continent.
This forms part of a three-day visit by the World Bank Vice President for Africa, Dr Hafez Ghanem.
The bank seeks to invest in the educational sector of the country, productive social protection which seeks to provide funds to help families increase their incomes, a very comprehensive rural water sanitation programme, among others.
Via Skype, the discussion featured the World Bank officials and 16 African countries, these include, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Benin, Chad, Ethiopia, Burundi, Malawi, Zambia, Liberia, Guinea, Senegal, among others.
As of October 2018, the World Bank Group scored Ghana 44% on Human Capital Index and Components (HCI).
Speaking at the event, the Country Director for the World Bank, Henry Kerali, decried Ghana’s low performance on the latest HCI report even though one of the best among its compatriots in West Africa.
“Think of yourselves as aiming higher; we still have a long way to go to able to catch up with countries like Rwanda, countries in Africa that are higher ranked in Human Capital Index terms but even higher than Rwanda because Ghana is low middle-income country and we should be aspiring to achieve the target set or at least averages achieved by other low middle-income countries so don’t set your targets to be the best among the worst but the best among the best.”
The HCI measures the amount of human capital that a child born today can expect to attain by age 18. It conveys the productivity of the next generation of workers compared to a benchmark of a complete education and full health.
It is constructed for 157 countries. It is made up of five indicators: the probability of survival to age five, a child’s expected years of schooling, harmonized test scores as a measure of quality of learning, adult survival rate (fraction of 15-year olds that will survive to age 60), and the proportion of children who are not stunted.
As per the findings of the Index, the probability of survival to age 5 is 95 out of 100 children born; thus 95 per cent of babies born in Ghana survive to age 5.
It is also revealed in the report that, in Ghana, a child who starts school at age 4 can expect to complete 11.6 years of school by her 18th birthday.
The expected complete years of school for a Ghanaian child who starts school at age 4 is 11.6 while the learning-adjusted years of school – factoring in what children actually learn, expected years of school is only 5.7 years.
