Beyond Education for All : Meeting the Human Resource Needs of Economic Development

The global education goals, with their emphasis on the quantitative indicators such as the enrollment rates or the number of years of schooling, may have led to too narrow a focus in linking education to human capital development. While many low-income countries have made remarkable progress towards achieving universal primary education, there are serious doubts about the content and quality of education indicating the need for a paradigm shift in education towards learning and skill development. To keep pace with increasingly competitive and globalized markets and rapidly changing technologies, education systems need to be geared towards developing well-balanced human resources with appropriate skills and flexibility for adjustment. Increasing attention will need to be paid beyond primary and post-primary education to tertiary education with the associated problems of skill mismatch, educated unemployment, the brain drain, on-job training and the educational financing and equity issues