National HRD

Understanding HRD in Southeast Asia cannot be complete without looking at prominent global and regional economic, political, and technological trends. Among these, the most critical are the globalization of economies, accelerated technology and innovation, the information and communication revolution, rapid organizational change and outsourcing of manufacturing/services operations of multinational corporations (MNCs). The role of HRD has been invaluable in preparing a diversified workforce by unleashing human expertise to face the challenges arising from the rapidly changing global business environment. However, South Asian countries often suffer from ineffective government policies, political uncertainty, and lack of trained HRD experts to initiate effective HRD practices at multiple levels. Inadequate emphasis of respective governments on enhancing employee productivity and organizational change has made most South Asian countries vulnerable to rapid global changes, thereby increasing poverty combined with social, political, and economic inequality. Slow economic growth and increasing youth unemployment (9.6% compared to global youth unemployment of 4.2%) has aggravated this situation (ILO, 2012). Even though globalization has influenced expansion of international markets, the accelerated speed of business transactions, aided by information communication technologies, and internationalization of MNCs, South Asian countries still lag behind compared to their neighboring Asian Tigers: Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea.

The conceptualization and description of HRD have not been consistent across countries. The purpose of this paper is to examine the conceptualization and description of HRD in Ghana as a way of addressing aspects of HRD, which are ignored or orphaned. We present a critical analysis of current literature and bring to light HRD practices in Ghana. We also focus on role of culture in HRD practices, as well as Ghana’s national policy and strategies. It is our contention that contemporary HRD theory is constricted by a fractured epistemology, which delineates areas such as capacity building and capacity development out of the realm of HRD. This paper is therefore situated in a theory that accounts for dynamic aspect of systems theory, capacity development and HRD. Our typology integrates and extends the conceptualization and definition of HRD into the realm of capacity development based on comprehensive sets of shared fundamental assumptions in HRD and systems theory.