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Combating brain drain with brain gain
2006-01-18 07:30:54
By Mireny John
Last week, the Vice Chancellor of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology of Accra Ghana, Prof. Kwasi Andam , rattled off shocking statistics about Africa’s labour dynamics.
Africa, he said, spends USD4 billion per year, equivalent to 35 percent of total official development aid to the continent, to employ some 100,000 Western experts.
These are recruited to perform functions generically described as ’technical assistance’, which could have been done by African experts lost to the brain drain of the western world.
Africa has already lost about a third of her human capital, and the three African countries, which have suffered most from the brain drain syndrome, are Ethiopia, Nigeria and Ghana.
Malawi is also suffering from continuous massive emigration of its nurses to the UK , where they are helping to shore up the country’s decaying, chronically understaffed National Health Service.
This trend is beyond doubt excruciating, bringing to the fore a well known, and old concept, of the need to develop and retain human resource for accelerated national development.
Africa loses out at three different levels. In the first place, the amount of scarce resources it devotes to educating a few of its citizens hoping that in future, they will play a pivotal role in national development efforts.
Second, an alarming paradox is that a percentage of the cash spent on education in Africa constitutes borrowed funds from either bilateral or multilateral sources.
Third, brain drain, meaning the emigration of African labour cream to the developed world, and mostly at its active stage, denies the continent the critical human resource input badly needed for planning and implementing development programmes.
To solve the problem of this syndrome that has been draining the continent’s meager resources, Prof. Andam suggested to African governments to increase access to higher education as well as investing more in science and technology (S&T).
He mentioned that S&T investment in the most developed countries is close to 2 percent of GDP, stating that S&T investment needs to be at least 1 percent of GDP to have any significant impact on the level of development.
However, the most central question would be hat ’motivates brain to drain from Africa’?
The answer is obvious: In the developed world, there are more and better opportunities that can satisfactorily compensate for the brains.
Although labour migration is a common phenomenon across the world, the concerns in Africa hinge on the fact that it is the most wanted workers who migrate to the Western world.
The seemingly ’un-brained African workers’ who migrate to Europe across the straight of Gibraltar from the shores of Moroccan are branded illegal immigrants, much so because they have nothing in particular to offer to the European economy, unlike the nurses from Malawi.
Although there are no ready made and binding solutions to the African brain drain, a long-term strategy targets at promoting policies which egg on competition between public and private sectors of the economy.
This strategy expands the horizon for choices, as teaching in a government owned secondary school against, say, in a private school, which pays thrice the amount of basic emolument under the public scheme of service.
Brains in Africa suffer melancholy when they see those in high places, often less educated than themselves, amassing wealth abruptly, far beyond any reasonable account.
Having missed out on the political platform, or any other high government post with an inbuilt opportunity for making rich pickings, they decide to beat it.
It is only fair to suggest that good governance has the necessary psychological power of combating brain drain with brain gain.
By extension, good governance has all the hallmarks of engendering economic growth with equity, by ensuring each get a fair portion of the national cake.
The thing is, there is more that can be done to make African brain feel that it can gain here at home just as it could in the western world. The brains are ours, let’s retain them.
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