Batswana are relatively broke, have inferior education and health services compared to two years ago.
The country’s Human Development Index, which measures a country’s health, education, and average income, has fallen over the past two years, in 2020 and 2021, undoing five years of advancement, according to the report.
Botswana has dropped seven places in the Human Development Index (HDI), ranking 117 out of 191 countries in the 2021-2022 period, according to a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report.
Botswana’s HDI value of 0.693 places the country in the medium human development category, lower than its value of 0.713 in the 2020 report. A country is considered to be having very high human development when it is in the 0,8 – 1.0 tier, high human development 0.7 – 0.79, medium human development 0.55 – 0. 70, and low human development is below 0.55.The seven spots drop in human development index, from a rank of 110 in 2020, comes at a time when global progress has stalled.
According to the index, Botswana’s expected years of schooling stand at 12.3 years, and the mean years of schooling are at 10.3 years. Expected years of schooling is the number of years a child of school entrance age is expected to spend at school, or university. It is the sum of the age-specific enrolment ratios for primary, secondary, post-secondary non-tertiary and tertiary education. On the other hand, mean years of schooling is important because it reflects the level of schooling of the population aged 25 years and above, hence the stock and quality of human capital within a country.
The UNDP titled: Uncertain Times, Unsettled Lives: Shaping our Future in a Transforming World, claims that life is becoming more and more unpredictable in ways that have never been seen before. The research also adds that this is consistent with the overall trend and shows that global human progress has stagnated for the first time in 32 years.
“The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, which has driven reversals in human development in almost every country continues to spin off variants unpredictably. War in Ukraine and elsewhere, more human suffering amid a shifting geopolitical order and strained multilateral system,” the report said.
Since 1990, the United Nations has created and compiled the Human Development Index (HDI) as a statistic to assess the levels of social and economic development in various nations. It consists of the average number of years spent in school, the projected number of years spent in school, life expectancy at birth, and the gross national income (GNI) per person.
