Nigeria does not usually rank high in many global indices. But considering its fast-growing population, the Global Human Capital rating by the World Economic Forum (WEF) is one index where the country’s low ranking has significant negative implications for its future viability.
According to WEF, the Global Human Capital rating seeks to measure the skills people possess that enable them to create value in the global economic system.
The report rates 130 countries on how well they are developing their human capital and sadly Nigeria ranks 114, just 16 places from the bottom. This basically means Nigeria’s huge human capital, often presented to the world as our greatest asset, is not being prepared to compete effectively in a fast-changing world.
This basically means Nigeria’s huge human capital, often presented to the world as our greatest asset, is not being prepared to compete effectively in a fast-changing world.
In sub-Saharan Africa, Rwanda, Ghana, Cameroon, Mauritius all have a better ranking than Nigeria. Norway topped the ranking followed closely by Finland and then Switzerland joins to make the top three countries with the best human capacity.
The United States and Germany are also in the top 10 countries.
The WEF notes that the countries topping the index are “high-income economies, with a longstanding commitment to their
people’s educational attainment and that have correspondingly placed a high importance on building their future human capacity potential and deployed a broad spectrum of their workforce in skill-intensive occupations across a broad range of sectors.”
Building up a stock of highly skilled workforce is not by accident but by design, the report shows. A deliberate set of policies has to be designed and executed to develop a country’s human capacity. The leading countries on the index have become leading players in the global economy because of their high-quality human capital and not because of their natural resource base.
The quality of the human capital available in a country determines its long term success, according to the WEF report. Countries with low-quality human capital will find it difficult to compete in an emerging world driven by knowledge and technology, increasingly globalised and being rapidly shaped by advanced technologies like artificial intelligence and robotics.
The WEF report makes a key point that because no one really knows what the jobs of tomorrow will look like, “there is a growing recognition that we have to prepare the next generation with future-ready skills and with the capacity for life-long learning.”
And this is where the challenge is for Nigeria with a fast-growing and largely youthful population. How well are we preparing Nigerian youths for the world of the future? The United Nations forecast that Nigeria’s population will surpass that of the US by 2050, 33 years from now when the country’s population is likely to hit about 400 million people, and become the third most populous country in the world.
By 2100, 83 years from now, Nigeria will have a population of 913 million, almost the same population as that of China in the same year. Interestingly, the UN notes that even in 2100, Nigeria will still have the world’s youngest population, with an average age of 32.6 years.
It is obvious that if this highly youthful population of the future are not equipped with the required skills to compete in a world that would be fundamentally different from the world we know today, then the current youth crisis represented in the form of Boko Haram, IPOB, OPC, Arewa Youths, will be a child’s play.
Nigeria’s future youthful population will leave in era that has been described as the fourth industrial revolution, an era described by Klaus Schwab as “characterized by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies and industries, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human.”
The Nigerian youths and adults of 2050 and beyond will live in the era of the fourth industrial revolution. Yet they are also today’s children most of whom are being trained in our dilapidated primary and secondary school systems across the country.
It is estimated that about 45 percent of Nigerians are currently under the age of 15. In another 33 years, most of these children and teenagers of today will be the young adults and teenagers of tomorrow that will be living in the third largest most populated country in the world.
Sadly, about 70 percent of today’s youths are in public schools that are ill-equipped to train them for the future. Even more worrisome is the number of children that are said to be out of school.
The Federal Ministry of Education recently disclosed that about 10.5 million children are out of school, roaming the streets as hawkers or Almajiris. Some are also kept as farmhands by their parents. These children are not being given any chance of getting prepared for a fundamentally different world that they will grow up to live in.
According to information on the website of UNICEF, 40 percent of Nigerian children aged six to 11 do not attend any primary school. Even for those who manage to get into school, 30 percent drop out from the primary school level and only 54 percent graduate from junior secondary school to senior secondary school.
The talent crisis in the country is huge and it looks to get worse over time. The country is giving birth to children that would be majorly unprepared to compete in future. If the current trend is not reversed, Nigeria’s huge population will be burden rather than a blessing in future. What would the world do with a population that does not have the skills and knowledge to deal with emerging challenges?
Basically, we are building the low-income population of the future and risk becoming the end of the world where highly skilled part of the world will come looking for those to do the dirty jobs and consume the products of the highly skilled world, which is not much different from our situation today.
But with increasing advances in robotics and artificial intelligence, robots could even be trained to do the physical and dirty jobs of the future. That will mean even the low paying jobs will not be easily available for those without the skills to compete for the high paying jobs. Cheap labour is not expected to be a competitive edge in future because most jobs will be automated anyway, and machines can introduce efficiencies that make cheap labour uncompetitive.
To reverse the trend, the government needs to increase investment in education. But the government must also realize it does not have the financial capacity to fully fund education. This has to be a shared burden between the government, parents, companies, and philanthropies. A sense of urgency and innovation and a dose of reality needs to be applied.
Currently, 90 percent of the country’s education budget goes into personnel costs, which are mostly salaries and emoluments.
The 10 percent left cannot support the capital expenditure needed to build a modern educational infrastructure that can equip our youths with the skills of the future. However, the government must take the lead with a combination of policies and incentives that will drive human capacity development. As rightly noted in the WEF report, countries will not compete in future on the basis of their natural resources, technology or infrastructure but on the basis of the quality of their human capital. For now, we do not have the human capital that can compete in the future neither are we preparing for it. We are walking into the future practically naked.
Anthony Osae-Brown
