Southern province overtakes Western province in human capital development

Sri Lanka’s Southern province has slightly surpassed the highly urbanised and developed Western province in terms of human capital development, according to the Human Capital Index (HCI) of the World Bank (WB).

The Southern province has the highest HCI score of 63 percent, followed by the Western province with 62 percent. The North Western province and Sabaragamuwa province with 59 percent each were ranked third and fourth, while the Eastern province is recorded to have the lowest HCI value of 51 percent.

“The high rank of the Southern province is an unexpected finding. The received wisdom is that the wealthy Western province is the most advanced region.

However, the current study shows that the Southern province, despite being considerably poorer than the Western province, has attained a slightly higher human capital, particularly due to better learning outcomes,” the WB said in its latest Human Capital Development Report on Sri Lanka.

The WB attributed the higher HCI level in the Southern province to close attention of policymakers and good teacher management and development.

The agency said it observed that the Southern province effectively deployed teachers from schools with teacher surpluses to schools with teacher deficits in a manner that minimised disruption to the ‘family lives’ of the teachers.

Doing so had reduced the resistance towards teacher transfers. The province is also noted to have recruited teachers to fill vacancies in remote, estate sector schools, which had suffered from teacher shortages for many years. “This is an encouraging finding for other provinces, as human capital development can be promoted faster than economic growth,” the WB said.

The HCI is a cross-country metric designed to measure and forecast a country’s human capital. The index follows the trajectory, from birth to childhood, of a child born today. It essentially measures the amount of human capital that a child can expect to attain by the age of 18, given the risks of poor health and poor education that exist in the country at the time of birth.

The HCI, which is different from the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Index (HDI), has three components: (1) a measure whether children from birth to school age (age five), (2) a measure of expected years if quality adjusted schooling, which takes into account the quantity and quality of schooling and (3) the two broad measures of nutrition and health, stunting rates and adult survival rates.