SUMMARY OF DELIVERABLES OF THE ECOWAS INTEGRATED REGIONAL STRATEGY FOR HUMAN CAPITAL DEVELOPMENT (HCD) 2030

1. The Authority of the Heads of State and Government at its fifty-ninth ordinary session adopted the ECOWAS Regional Integrated Human Capital Development (HCD) 2030 Strategy. With the adoption of the Regional HCD Strategy, ECOWAS has set an ambitious objective to become a top-performing Regional Economic Community in Human Capital Development Strategy (HCD) by 2030 in sub-Saharan Africa. The ECOWAS HCD Strategy focuses on three thematic areas, which are stated as follows:

• • Health and Nutrition;
  • Education, Skills, and Labour participation; and
  • Entrepreneurship, Financial Inclusion, and Digital Payments.

2. Under the thematic areas, 18 strategic indicators have been developed and implemented in each Member State of ECOWAS. All the fifteen Member States are at various stages of developing their own national human capital development (HCD), with the regional HCD strategy as a reference.
3. To achieve this ambitious strategy, ECOWAS is supporting the Member States to improve their HCD outcomes over the next 10 years through these four strategic levers:

A. Advocacy, policies, and communication:

•     Create a regional HCD Vision.
•     Promote the adoption of HCD best practices.
•     Communicate on HCD with key stakeholders.

B. Monitoring and Evaluation:

• Track and evaluate progress on HCD.

C. Capability building and knowledge sharing:

• Facilitate learning and knowledge sharing.
• Develop training programs and regional centers of excellence.
• Facilitate skills reinforcement and talent transfer.
• Promote on-the-ground technical support.

D.Resource Mobilisation:

• Promote coordination between donors for resource mobilization and deployment.
• Support member states to improve fundraising and resource deployment.

4. The overall objective of the ECOWAS Integrated Human Capital Development Strategy (2020- 2030) is to support the Member States by providing regional leadership such as advocacy and coordination. The Strategy is designed to address gaps and challenges in national strategies such as lack of regional vision and priorities, resource constraints, poor capacity, and decision-making mechanisms, inconsistent priorities, limited coordination mechanisms, limited local capacity to support implementation, as well as restrictive perceptions and mindsets.
5. To date, the following HCD tools and documents (i) ECOWAS Integrated HCD Index, 2021 have been built to track the latest performance and progress towards the 2030 Strategy, (ii)  ECOWAS Gender Index 2021, and (iii)  Human Development Monitoring and Evaluation Dashboard to track country progress, (iv)  ECOWAS 2021 HCD report, (v)  Assessment report on Gender Transformative Action, (vi)  Capability building on cross-cutting skills such as problem-solving, designing a strategy, effective communication to stakeholders for 2022 have been developed. All these outcomes were validated by the experts and the ministerial meeting for the effective implementation of the 2030 human development strategy in our region and were adopted at the sixty-first ordinary session of the Authority of Heads of State and Government on 3 July 2022 in Accra, Republic of Ghana.