Giving Compass' Take:

• Devex reports on the World Bank's human capital project, which will seek to rank countries based on the progress they are making across many different social sectors, all based on outcomes.

• How much are aid organizations investing in human capital, meaning skills, ingenuity and knowledge, etc.? An index, like the World Bank's, should hopefully go along way to determine where the gaps are.

• Here's why investing in human capital is so important to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.

Health, education, and social services are not new areas of expertise at the World Bank, but the need for governments to focus on achieving quality outcomes may never have been higher.

In Bali, Indonesia, at the World Bank’s annual meetings in October, the institution will launch a new human capital index to rank countries on the outcomes they are achieving with investments in health, education, and social services. While the index is a highly visible — and perhaps controversial — element of the bank’s work on these issues, it is only one piece of a broader human capital portfolio that the institution is increasingly emphasizing.

The basis of this effort is a growing body of research at the bank, which describes a future world in which countries may not be able to rely on the same pathways to development that other countries followed in the past, said Annette Dixon, the bank’s vice president of human development.

“Not only is there a need to invest more in human capital to get to high-income status, the future world is actually going to need even healthier and better educated people than ever before — and that's one of the most important things that policymakers can do to prepare for a much more complex, technology-driven world,” Dixon told Devex.

Read the full article about the World Bank's human capital project by Michael Igoe at Devex International Development.