Situating the Impact of Official Development Assistance (ODA) on Human Capital Development in Nigeria

Abstract

Human capital remains one the greatest assets of any nation and as such, successful economies have always focused on enhancing the quality of their human capital stock. Nigeria and developing economies are confronted with human capital development challenges caused by poor and insufficient capital needed to build human capacity. Developing nations till date scramble for International capital to augment their capital needs for various investments including in human capacity. Foreign capital comes in forms of loans, investments, remittances or official development assistance (ODA), which is also called foreign aid or grants. Developing countries have witnessed little or low economic improvements despite having capitalised on different the windows of foreign capital to support their economies. ODA has been debated internationally with questions of whether it leads to the enhancement of the wellbeing of the underdeveloped countries or whether is merely serves as tool for control and dominance by developed economies. This narrative has presented researchers with the task and the interest to conduct various works on the impact of the different forms of international capital including the official development assistance on human capital development (HCD). Various studies on the extant topic came up with either conflicting and or mixed findings. This study therefore aims at exploring further, the impact of official development assistance (ODA) on human capital development. This researcher used Project aid (PAID), Programmed Aid (PRAID), Technical Assistance (TA), Humanitarian Aid (HA) and Food Aid (FA) to proxy ODA. The specific objectives are to explore, determine, assess, examine and ascertain the effect of PAID, PRAID, TA, HA and FA on HCD. The study adopted ex-post facto research design and data were sourced data from the Central Bank of Nigeria Statistical Bulletin and Annual Reports and the World Bank Development Indicators. Sourced data were analyzed