Human Development

New forces are transforming the world of work. The transitions involved call for decisive action. Countless opportunities lie ahead to improve the quality of working lives, expand choice, close the gender gap, reverse the damages wreaked by global inequality, and much more. Yet none of this will happen by itself. Without decisive action we will be heading into a world that widens existing inequalities and uncertainties. Technological advances – artificial intelligence, automation and robotics – will create new jobs, but those who lose their jobs in this transition may be the least equipped to seize the new opportunities. Today’s skills will not match the jobs of tomorrow and newly acquired skills may quickly become obsolete. The greening of our economies will create millions of jobs as we adopt sustainable practices and clean technologies but other jobs will disappear as countries scale back their carbon- and resource-intensive industries. Changes in demographics are no less significant. Expanding youth populations in some parts of the world and ageing populations in others may place pressure on labour markets and social security systems, yet in these shifts lie new possibilities to afford care and inclusive, active societies. We need to seize the opportunities presented by these transformative changes to create a brighter future and deliver economic security, equal opportunity and social justice – and ultimately reinforce the fabric of our societies.

The Ibrahim Index of African Governance (IIAG) is a tool that measures and monitors governance performance in African countries. The Mo Ibrahim Foundation defines governance as the provision of the political, social and economic public goods and services that every citizen has the right to expect from their state, and that a state has the responsibility to deliver to its citizens. In the IIAG, country performance in delivering governance is measured across four key components that effectively provide indicators of a country’s Overall Governance performance.
The key components that form the four categories of the IIAG as described in the diagram below are Safety & Rule of Law, participation & Human Rights, Sustainable Economic Opportunity and Human Development. Each of these categories contains subcategories under which we have organised various indicators that provide quantifiable measures of the overarching dimensions of governance. In total, the IIAG contains 100 indicators.

Today, we are at the beginning of a Fourth Industrial Revolution. Developments in genetics, artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology, 3D printing and biotechnology, to name just a few, are all building on and amplifying one another. This will lay the foundation for a revolution more comprehensive and all-encompassing than anything we have ever seen. Smart systems—homes, factories, farms, grids or cities—will help tackle problems ranging from supply chain management to climate change. The rise of the sharing economy will allow people to monetize everything from their empty house to their car.
While the impending change holds great promise, the patterns of consumption, production and employment created by it also pose major challenges requiring proactive adaptation by corporations, governments and individuals. Concurrent to the technological revolution are a set of broader socio-economic, geopolitical and demographic drivers of change, each interacting in multiple directions and intensifying one another. As entire industries adjust, most occupations are undergoing a fundamental transformation. While some jobs are threatened by redundancy and others grow rapidly, existing jobs are also going through a change in the skill sets required to do them. The debate on these transformations is often polarized between those who foresee limitless new opportunities and those that foresee massive dislocation of jobs. In fact, the reality is highly specific to the industry, region and occupation in question as well as the ability of various stakeholders to manage change.
The Future of Jobs Report is a first step in becoming specific about the changes at hand. It taps into the knowledge of those who are best placed to observe the dynamics of workforces—Chief Human Resources and Strategy Officers—by asking them what the current shifts mean, specifically for employment, skills and recruitment across industries and geographies. In particular, we have introduced a new measure—skills stability—to quantify the degree of skills disruption within an occupation, a job family or an entire industry. We have also been able to provide an outlook on the gender dynamics of the changes underway, a key element in understanding how the benefits and burdens of the Fourth Industrial Revolution will be distributed.

Africa is at a tipping point in 2016. Despite all the success the continent has achieved in recent years, new and old dangers—economic, political, and security-related—threaten to derail its progress. With sound policymaking, effective leadership, and enough foresight, however—Africa can meet and defeat these challenges as well as the many more to come.

In this year's Foresight Africa, the Africa Growth Initiative and its colleagues discuss six overarching themes that place Africa at this tipping point and give their view on what they perceive to be key areas for intervention to keep Africa on its current rising trajectory. This year's format is different from years past, encompassing viewpoints from high-level policymakers, academics, and practitioners, as well as utilizing visuals to better illustrate the paths behind and now in front of Africa.

Productivity is the ultimate engine of growth in the global economy. Raising productivity is therefore a fundamental challenge for countries going forward. This new OECD report on The Future of Productivity shows that we are not running out of ideas. In fact, the growth of the globally most productive firms has remained robust in the 21st century. However, the gap between those global leaders and the rest has increased over time, and especially so in the services sector. This implies that knowledge diffusion should not to be taken for granted. Future growth will largely depend on our ability to revive the diffusion machine, both within and across countries. At the same time, there is much scope to boost productivity and reduce inequality simply by more effectively allocating human talent to jobs.

The Strategic Foresight Analysis (SFA) identified five themes: Political, Human, Technology, Economics/Resources and Environment. Under these themes 15 trends were identified that are expected to shape the future security environment out to 2030 and beyond. From these 15 trends, one trend was analysed in more depth - Demographics.

Project PREDICT (Projections and Relevant Effects of Demographic Implications, Changes, and Trends), was launched at the end of 2013 as a follow-up study to the SFA. Building on long-term cooperation between ACT and the University of Bologna (Italy), the PREDICT project also involved the active participation of the University of Warwick (UK), Sabanci University (Turkey), Johns Hopkins University – SAIS (US/Italy) and the Bruno Kessler Foundation (Italy).

SFA was designed as an iterative process and one which NATO intends to update regularly to provide NATO, national leaders and defence planners with a perspective of the challenges facing the Alliance in the decades to come. Within this framework, the PREDICT goal has been to further develop the research of the “human theme”, focusing on human demographics as the main forecasting variable employed to build different scenarios for NATO in 2035. PREDICT provides an analysis of demographic trends such as population growth, aging, and population composition all of which play a fundamental role in the current and foreseeable shifting distribution of international power. The report also provides security challenges which largely depend on the broader socio-political context in which demographic trends interact with economic, environmental, energy, health and technological trends.

Africa is now the world’s second fastest-growing continent. In this decade of seismic shifts in the global economy, Africa has defied the pessimists, accelerating its economic pulse and seeing significant improvements in its Human Development Indicators. But these positive developments have been tempered by a crisis in jobs, youth unemployment and growing inequality. These are now the challenges. Growth must bring jobs and opportunities for all. That will happen if growth is sustained and leads to the structural change and economic transformation that will enable the continent to join global value chains. It will do this by closing the infrastructure gap, speeding up economic integration, dealing with conflicts old and new, and developing human capital.
This is what makes the next decade so decisive. This is what makes this new Bank Strategy for 2013–2022 so vital.