The purpose of the paper is to identify the specific dimensions of Human Resource Development Climate (HRDC) that significantly affect Employee Engagement (EE). It places the importance of HRDC in enhancing EE within the public sector in a developing country and finds answer to the question on the dimension of HRDC that causes employees to be engaged. The paper uses a self-designed questionnaire, made up of Rao and Abraham (1990) HRD Climate survey and Utrecht Work Engagement Scale by Schaufeli et al., (2002) to gather data from 355 respondents and analysed using multiple regression. Based on the data analysed, results showed that HRDC has a positive and significant effect on employee engagement. Additionally, it was found that employees are highly engaged in situations where their organisation exhibits the HR Mechanism dimension of HRDC. The limitation is, it did not focus on the entire public sector but focused on civil servant. It is therefore recommended that further studies could be carried out with focus on other public sector organisations to confirm or refute the findings. This study adds to the limited literature on HRDC and EE in public sector organisations in a developing country. This finding brings to bear the major dimension of HRDC that managers should focus on to improve employee engagement in a developing country where there exist a high power distance culture.

In this article, we propose ways for organizations in Anglophone West African (AWA) countries to tackle their human capital challenges in order to attain a competitive edge and globally position themselves. Human capital is critical to an organization’s survival. While organizations in advanced countries are focusing their attention on building their human capital for the sustenance of competitive advantage, those in AWA countries lag behind, leading to poor service delivery and low productivity. Resource-based view and open systems theories highlight the importance of human capital management for organizational effectiveness. The paper adopts a conceptual approach and proposes a human capital centered model comprising six core factors that are vital in facilitating effective human capital management for sustainable competitive advantage. It concludes by emphasizing effective research collaboration between academia and industry in AWA countries and suggests testing of the model in organizations in AWA countries for applicability.