National HRD: the Key to Achieve SDGs in Sri Lanka

Abstract

The agenda for ‘Sustainable Development Goals’ or ‘Global Goals’ was adopted by the United Nation in 2015 with a mission of a ‘shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future’. The many agree that to achieve SDGs, the progress in Human Development (HD) is needed. The UN testifies that ‘SDGs provide a development destination while human development allows one to design the route to get there’. In achieving the human development through a macro–human resource development perspective, many authors have identified ‘national HRD’ as a plausible mechanism (McLean, 2001). This ongoing research aims to delineate the NHRD’s plausibility as the foundation for achieving SDGs. Thus, the researcher expects to provide learnings to the reader through a poster on a conceptual model explaining how National HRD can help achieve SDG through resolving human resource development challenges in Sri Lanka. The researcher designs this study as a content analysis using the latest literature on HRD, NHRD, HD, SDGs, and other relevant documents. The results reveal that Sri Lanka has not pursued a national HRD agenda except practical evidence of national level HRD practices that have been driven under social and welfare development agendas. Further it was revealed that Sri Lanka purely believe in human resource management which is traditionally practiced resolving workforce issues within corporate organizations. Finally, a conceptual model is presented to show how NHRD help achieve SDGs through resolving human resource challenges in the country. In concluding, the researcher highlights that prolonged development issues exist in Sri Lanka due to its failure to adopt and execute an HRD agenda to resolve its people issues beyond corporate levels in comparison with the achievements of other regional countries. It was justified that NHRD is plausible to achieve SDG through resolving human resource development challenges in Sri Lanka as presented in the conceptual model of the research.