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Economic theory has long acknowledged a positive relation between human capital and economic growth (Smith, 1776; Becker, 1964), which was nevertheless called into question in the late 1990s (Caselli et al., 1996; Pritchett, 2001). The two primary criticisms evoked were the failure to consider diminishing returns to education and qualitative aspects of the stock of human capital. Thiswork aims to redress inadequacies in the literature related to the usual proxy of human capital by advancing a composite indicator of human capital (PCA). This indicator allows for an integration of the qualitative aspects in question and uses the indicator of the stock of human capital (Mincer, 1974) to take diminishing returns into consideration. Adopting the methodology developed by Islam (1995) allows for the impact of human capital to become positive once again in the process of economic growth. The data also reveal a conditional convergence process for the 22 African countries considered over the period 1970 to 2000.
