- The Human Capital Index Plus (HCI+) shows how health, education, employment, and on-the-job learning shape future productivity and earnings.
- At the World Bank Group Spring Meetings, the Human Capital Hub gave visitors a hands-on way to explore country data, compare peers, and see where progress is possible.
- Income does not determine destiny. Countries such as Rwanda, Peru, Kenya, the Kyrgyz Republic, and Viet Nam are delivering human capital outcomes far above their income levels.
Across low- and middle-income countries, deficits in nutrition, education, and employment are eroding human potential, costing them more than half their future lifetime earnings. Half of women remain outside the workforce. One in five young people is neither in school nor in work, losing the formative years when skills are built and career paths take shape. Meanwhile, 7 in 10 workers receive no on-the-job training, depriving them of the continuous learning needed to advance their human capital. The window for action is now as 2 in 3 low- and middle-income countries are moving in the wrong direction on at least one key human capital dimension.
Policymakers face an additional challenge: the returns on investments in people often take years, sometimes decades, to materialize, which can weaken the incentives to act with urgency.
The Human Capital Index Plus (HCI+) was built to address this. It provides a clear, comparable measure of how investments in people translate into future productivity. It shows how much human capital a child born today can expect to accumulate from birth through working age, based on the health, education, and employment conditions in the country where they live.
read more: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2026/05/05/from-data-to-opportunity-putting-human-capital-in-people-s-hands
