By Prof. Protus Nathan Uzorma
The importance of human development in a society cannot be over emphasized. It is a necessary condition for the swift thriving of every human community. Certainly, the outcome of human development is unpredictable, and as Sir Ken Robinson wittingly asserted, “You cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do is like a farmer creates the conditions under which it will begin to flourish.”
Consequently, it is the function of the leadership of every Community to see to the growth and development of the individuals who are the citizens of the community, and as Harvey S. Firestone declared, “The growth and development of people is the highest calling of leadership.” It is then the duty of every compatriot of a given Community to vouch safe the growth and development of its citizens. This development has great import on the Community, and as the German theoretical-physicist, Albert Einstein, rightly asserted, “All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded the individual.” In this backdrop, it is evident as Joseph E. Stiglitz declared that “development is about transforming the lives of people, not just transforming economies.”
However, this article explores the meaning of human development and human capital development, as well as the ways of attaining it. From this subject of ratiocination, it is goes further to investigate the importance of human development and its challenges in our communities, and at the end, it proposes the way forward.
The discussions above show the common bonds between human development and human capital, especially the concern of human development on the improvement of human conditions, so that people have the chance to lead full lives. To great somewhat, this shows that human capital is central to human development, and the latter to socioeconomic advancement of a nation-State.
Human capital is a concept popularized by an economist, Gary Becker, of the University of Chicago, who defined it as “activities that influence future monetary and psychic income by increasing resources in people,” and its main forms were schooling and on-the-job training, medical care, migration, and searching for information about prices and incomes. It refers to the stock of knowledge, habits, social and personality attributes, including creativity, embodied in the ability to perform labour so as to produce economic value.
As what is central to human development, human capital development means the skills, knowledge, and experience possessed by an individual or a population viewed in terms of their value or cost, to an organization or country. Michael Watts asserts that “The knowledge, skills, and experience a worker has acquired are the workers human capital. Education and training can only clearly increase workers’ human capital and productivity, which makes them more valuable to employers.” This shows that human capital is not only central but essential for human development.
More so, human capital development is also seen in some purviews as a measure of the skills, education, capacity and attributes of labour, which influences human productive capacities and earning potentials. In the educational, planning and budgeting perspective, human capital is the collective skills, knowledge, or other intangible assets of individuals that can be used to create economic value for the individuals, for their employers or their community.
To this effect, education is an investment in human capital that pays off in terms of higher productivity. According to the Business Dictionary, human capital concerns: Health, knowledge, motivation, and skills, the attainment of which is regarded as an end in itself (irrespective of their income potential) because they yield fulfilment and satisfaction to the individual. For the Britannica Dictionary, human capital is the tangible collective resources possessed by individuals and groups within a given population. These resources include all the knowledge, talents, skills, abilities, experience, intelligence, training, judgment and wisdom possessed individually and collectively, the cumulative total of which represents a form…
Nevertheless, human capital development has different tenets. These include: Quality intellectual training, sound physical and mental health, degree and quality of skills acquired, entrepreneurial ability, resource motivations for survival, etc.[5]
As a result of the above, citizens of a Community can increase their skills, knowledge, and earning potentials in various ways, such as attending higher institutions, entering apprenticeship or skill acquisition programs. This makes human capital a crucial measurement of poverty in the community, and as such human capital must be enhanced. [6] This also calls for patriotism and government-public partnership in societal development, as individuals, the affluent, apex government functionaries, the people representatives in local government, State and federal legislative arms of government, all have to join hands in tackling poverty through human capital development. It ought to be a private lifetime vow and personal undertaking to train, assist and sponsor many youths within their reach; with the aim of increasing their earning potentials (through advanced skills and knowledge); in order to stem out poverty and assist in decreasing the rate of unemployment in the State. These imply that the blessed and lucky few affluent in our Community have to put in their best to ensure massive or plausible human capital development of our youths.
The concept ‘development’ is a social one and pertains to the sociological and economic fields. It means growth with structural and technological changes, which involves the manufacturing and service sectors, such as construction and transport, as well as the intangible works such as legal services, surveying and valuing, etc.
In this perspective, human capital development entails human development, which is the process of enlarging people’s freedoms and opportunities, and improving their wellbeing.[7] It is a concept developed by the economist Mahbub ul Haq, and it is about the real freedom people have to decide who to be, what to do, and how to live.[8] Without these decisions, no Community can thrive well or advance progressively. The youths who are the pillars of sustainability for the Community will lose focus, be stranded and will be stacked in underdevelopment, measuring nowhere in the competitive market.
Consequently, there are certain lasting benefits that are attached to human capital development, which constitute the importance of human development. Human capital development prods creativity, inventions and innovations, which increases competitive advantage, and enhances positive human attitudes. When the younglings of a given community are properly directed and channeled to the real lane for rapid human development, attending sufficient former education, possessing stimulating skill training and laudable empowerments, the spade of rise in human capital development increases, which coefficients speedup socioeconomic development in the community.
More so, human capital development endows our children with the capacity for high quality of labor and high productivity,[9] and this accordingly leads to constant promotions, retentions and training for them, which result in career development that has strong socioeconomic outcomes for the native communities. Human capital development increases employee’s value in the workplace, as an employer that has very skilled workers is bound to have a noteworthy competitive advantage via human capital.
The argument here is that a well-founded human capital development disposes the individual who is our product, to opportunities for further training and retraining or repositioning for optimum productivity that attracts advantage to the beneficiary. It is in this backdrop that James Heintz and Hector Saez, asserted that human capital development not only ensured the accumulation of principal factors of production to ensure development, but also insisted that it is investments on persons with the vision of attaining high level productivity both in the workplace[10] and in their native hometowns Thus, education, health, training and empowerment of a population have lots to do with their labor productivity, which has positive feedbacks in the individual’s community. It also ensures self-reliance, which rise and fall for Kalu Onwuka, is a necessary indices of economic development.[11]