World Bank Report: Fusion of Technological Revolution and Human Capital

South Asia’s human capital challenges are among the most severe in the world. They include severe child malnutrition, critically inadequate early learning, a persistent burden of infectious diseases, the disempowerment of women, and pervasive structural inequalities.

By the end of August 2020, within a few months of the start of the first wave of the pandemic, the region had reported 4.4 million infections and 75,000 deaths. The scale of the direct and indirect impacts was highlighted, with prevention and health services being diverted to fight COVID-19, leading to a deterioration in the health of the most vulnerable groups.

In education, widespread school closures in 2020 had already been low before the pandemic. In 2020, South Asia’s lockdown measures in the early months of the pandemic were stricter than in Europe or North America, affecting nearly 400 million children, with a disproportionately negative impact on girls. Preliminary estimates put the loss of income at $4,400 per student, equivalent to 5% of total income.

At the same time, the pandemic has led to staggering job losses and disruptions to migration that will have long-term economic consequences. About 50 million jobs were lost in South Asia during the first phase of the pandemic.

The top priority for South Asia is to contain the shock to human capital and recover quickly from the pandemic, ensuring rapid progress towards achieving better and more equitable outcomes.

In addition, the profound converging technology revolution sweeping the world before the pandemic is transforming the relationship between technology and human capital and complicating it by creating a host of new opportunities to accelerate human capital outcomes while generating new and significant risks. This converging revolution is characterized by the combination of virtual, physical, biological, and cognitive technologies with the power of big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI).

In addition to these positive developments, there are also huge implications for human capital empowerment, as multiple applications and devices are collecting data on individuals and social groups, and artificial intelligence is automatically analyzing data from different sources.

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