This study examines the important contributions of human capital resources for sustainable economic growth in East African over the period 1980–2018. Even if there is a rapid growth in the number of schools and students’ enrolment in the education system in East Africa, the reality on the ground shows that the lowest level of human capital development raises the issues of employment challenges. In this regard, the estimation results reveal that the growth rates of human capital resources (HCR) and the physical capital stock (PCS) have long-run effects on the growth rate of gross national income (GNI). In addition, the short–term transmission mechanism of the vector autoregressive (VAR) system also indicates that HCR growth hugely contributes to the development of PCS through GNI.