Africa is a continent with remarkable economic potential yet the least developed largely due to its inadequate human capital to transform this potential into social and economic development. The focus on provision of classroom education as the cornerstone of human capital development in Africa has not produced the desirable outcomes expected. We see an important role in this process within the workplace, and thus argue that the role of Human Resource (HR) professionals in Human Capital development in Africa deserves serious attention. The paper outlines why and how HR professionals can contribute to the development of Africa's human capital. It also highlights the challenges HR professionals will face and the competencies they will need to address the challenges. The paper concludes with suggestions for further research.

It is widely argued that institutions and organizations are the building blocks of modern societies. However, African nations are characterized by an institutional void and ineffective organizations. In fact, even the effectiveness of informal institutions such as customs and traditions is now debatable. Therefore, this paper sets out to provide a novel approach for building effective organizations, leaders and people based on the foundation of spirituality and the African philosophy of Ubuntu. We coupled the concepts of spirituality and Ubuntu and advanced a framework and techniques to guide the development of African organizations and its people. We have provided theoretical and practical rationale for the use of spirituality and Ubuntu to augment the Western-based modern approach to managing organizations and their people.

This paper, based on a desk study, adopts a path-dependent perspective to explore how local government authorities in Ghana have attempted to institutionalise performance management at the organisational level. It questions the existing performance diagnostic framework that is used to assess local government authorities by arguing that any attempt to consolidate the prevailing ‘performance assessment regime’ ought to re-examine previous government initiatives that had in-built mechanisms for assessing local government performance. The prevailing system, despite its attempt to empower local authorities further promotes central government manipulation of local government administration. The paper concludes that performance assessment of local governments in Ghana will remain ineffective until local government councils genuinely serve local communities and their citizens by achieving goals and objectives that are consistent with the needs and aspirations of the latter rather than relying on annual performance assessments designed to ignore the opinions of citizens.

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