Young people in Azerbaijan, like elsewhere in the Europe and Central Asia region, are being provided with the opportunities needed to grow into productive adults, thanks to continued investments in health and education during their childhood and teenage years, says the latest update of the World Bank’s Human Capital Index (HCI), which measures pre-pandemic human capital outcomes around the world, Modern Diplomacy writes in the article Azerbaijan Makes Progress in Health and Education, but Needs to Invest More. This year’s report includes a decade-long analysis of human capital development from 2010 to 2020 in 103 countries. Azerbaijan is among the top 10 global improvers in progress made on health and education.
However, the Covid-19 pandemic and resulting turbulence in the commodity markets are threatening the gains made so far, with numerous challenges to maintaining health and education services in the face of pandemic-related restrictions to protect public health.
Azerbaijan’s HCI value is 0.58, meaning that a child born today in Azerbaijan can expect to achieve 58 percent of the productivity of a fully educated adult in optimal health. This is slightly higher than average for the Upper-Middle Income Countries.
However, Azerbaijan has room for improvement in terms of the productivity of its people. For example, among the region’s emerging economies, a child born in Poland today can expect to achieve 75 percent of productivity when she grows into an adult.
“Governments in Europe and Central Asia have done well in prioritizing investment in health and education, which are key drivers of growth and development. The challenges unleashed by Covid-19, however, require an even stronger policy response, including greater use of technology to improve service delivery and enhanced social assistance programs, to ensure that people receive quality education and health care,” said Anna Bjerde, World Bank Vice President for the Europe and Central Asia region.
The recently completed study Survive, Learn, Thrive: Strategic Human Capital Investments to Accelerate Azerbaijan’s Growth, carried out by the World Bank and Government of Azerbaijan, has identified progress and challenges in building and activating human capital in Azerbaijan. Over the last 10 years child mortality and child stunting rates in Azerbaijan have dropped considerably. However, despite increased years of schooling, there are widening inequalities in learning outcomes (students from wealthier families scored the equivalent of three years of schooling above students from poorer families on Harmonized Learning Outcomes). Azerbaijan also faces a growing burden of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) for which high out-of-pocket (OOP) payments (accounting for 79 percent of current health spending) are not enough to counter the growing number of NCDs.
To tackle ongoing human capital development challenges in the education sector, Azerbaijan needs to increase access to early learning programs and improve relevance of the higher education system. In the health system, it needs to improve the system’s response to chronic diseases and increase the efficiency of financial resources to ensure better health care provision. In the area of social protection and labor, the country needs to increase investment in social assistance to support the most vulnerable and expand the scope and coverage of active labor market programs.
“Azerbaijan’s population, its ‘human capital’, is the most precious resource in the country and the World Bank is committed to supporting opportunities to further enhance the well-being and productivity of the population – across ages and genders and regions,” said Sarah Michael, World Bank Country Manager for Azerbaijan.
The World Bank’s HCI looks at a child’s trajectory, from birth to age 18, on such critical metrics as child survival (birth to age 5); expected years of primary and secondary education adjusted for quality; child stunting; and adult survival rates. HCI 2020, based on data up to March of this year, provides a crucial pre-pandemic baseline that can help inform health and education policies and investments for the post-pandemic recovery.
