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Africa and the brain drain
Until the ideas men (and women), Africa’s real senators, return home, African renaissance and the fight against poverty will remain mere empty slogans. (Philip Emeagwali, winner of a Gordon Bell prize)
Over the last few years, worsening living conditions in Africa have led to an increasing number of people being prepared to abandon their home country in the hope of finding a better future for their families. In this way, millions of young people feel forced to emigrate because they believe that there is no chance of building themselves a future in their own country. In many of these cases, these are highly qualified people whose attempts to make progress at home have been frustrated.
In 2000, 25% of African emigration involved people with a high level of training: teaching staff, medical professionals, engineers, computer experts, etc. who were looking for a more comfortable life in the United States, Canada, Australia or the European Union. It is estimated that out of the 4.7 million Africans living in Europe, more than 100,000 are qualified professionals. In addition it has been calculated that around 63,000 people with university degrees and 50,000 executives emigrate every year from the African continent. As an example, 67 out of every 100 people with university studies emigrate in Cape Verde.
This “brain drain” has a considerable effect on the development of the country they leave behind. For these countries, fleeing human capital represents a loss on the investment made in training that, on the contrary, helps Northern countries to develop and innovate. In this way, for impoverished economies in African countries this represents an important stripping of talent. Taking away qualified people from teaching, technology, healthcare which they require to rise above poverty and stagnation has a seriously harmful effect on them.
Faced with this outlook, the problem is increasingly worrying within the heart of the continent and initiatives are growing to alleviate it. The African Union insists on the need to improve tertiary education and make it easier for students and teaching staff to travel between African countries to broaden work opportunities and stop losing them to non African countries. These initiatives also include the African Virtual University, founded by the World Bank in 1997, which operates in 17 countries and has trained 24,000 students.
However bringing qualified people back to Africa remains the main stumbling block. To achieve this, specific policies are proposed intended to improve work centres to which these professionals do not wish to return (hospitals, universities, research labs) as well as asking Europe and the USA to be flexible when granting visas so that professional personnel and experts who have trained there can return regularly to update their specialisation.
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