RIYADH: Discussions on investing in human capital in the Global South must consider the effects of geopolitical tensions, refugee crises, and disease outbreaks, a panel of experts said.
Rami Ahmad, Islamic Development Bank’s senior adviser to the president, noted that, like many other multilateral development banks, the ISDB was “priding itself” on its investments in human capital and infrastructure in the region prior to 2011.
Following the events of the Arab Spring in the early 2010s, when many countries “erupted,” it became evident that investments in human capital, from early education to vocational training, rather than merely in infrastructure, create more sustainable outcomes.
Speaking on a panel at the Human Capability Initiative in Riyadh, the senior adviser affirmed that at the heart of “all this chaos” is a lack of “real development” of the human capabilities in these countries.
Ahmad cited the ongoing war in Gaza, saying: “Look at how many years of developing and financing health and education projects in a place like Gaza, for example, just to see it go down the drain in a few weeks. That how we deal with restoring the capabilities of 2 million people and storing the capabilities of 2 million people. We, as financial institutions, we plan, we implement, and then something like this happens.”
He added: “This is why we need to do education differently. We need to come at the early stages of childhood. We need to have this dialogue instead of monologue. We need to deal with the minorities, people like we were talking about — the refugees. There are 70 million people in the world who are refugees or internally displaced people. How do you deal with their education and we need a holistic approach. It’s not the education only. We need to talk about food security, we need to talk about health and well-being.”
As the World Health Organization’s regional director for the Eastern Mediterranean, Hanan Balkhy, declared that in the scenarios outlined by Ahmad of internally displaced populations and geopolitics, retaining the health workforce becomes “very challenging.”
She stressed the need for a “heavy lift” for education within the sector in the region and a shift in mindset that pushes nations toward looking at peace as a worthy investment.
The director said: “We talk about building for years and destroying within hours. So, if we can preach for peace as much as we can, that’s number one. Number two, we need to be innovative in preparing the youngsters.”
Balkhy highlighted the region’s “very low” focus on public health and how comprehensive strategies are now essential given that infrastructure alone isn’t sufficient to address complex health scenarios.
“It’s not that tertiary care hospital, it’s not that very well-equipped ICU or operating room. It is how do you give vaccinations for two million people who are actually having babies on a border between two countries? How do you access them,” she posed.
Echoing the notions introduced by the regional director, the IsDB executive affirmed that whether public health outbreaks or conflicts, there needs to be a significant shift in how “we provide finance” ensuring that investments are used to build in a “real sustainable development way.”
One of the proposed solutions by the panelists was ensuring the ability to retain local talent.
According to the World Bank, there is $160 billion annually in forgone income within advanced economies, caused by the “brain drain” that is trickling from the developing nations to the developed world.
Similarly, the WTO outlined that while the African continent carries 24 percent of the world’s disease burden, it has only 2 percent of the global workforce because “all these brains have migrated to the north,” Ahmed noted.
“We in ISDB provide 18,000 scholarships, some of them came back to their countries but many of them really they stay in the north, and they feel more comfortable. We need to change the policies about scholarships, which makes sure they come back via the attractive environment for them to come back or try to benefit from what they are doing,” he said
“Without doing so, we are basically giving our best and brightest and having a bad investment, very policies, where we finance and we invest in basic education and then we send the best and brightest and we don’t reap the benefits from them in charging the future,” he concluded.
