'Brain Drain' Dizzys Africa, Carribbean

Author: Deborah Jones Features Editor

Who owns knowledge? Can a person be blamed for looking for better opportunities? What drives people to leave their homelands and never return? These were a few of the questions addressed by three professors and a panel of Middlebury students in two discussions of the phenomenon of Brain Drain earlier this month.

While many pupils might identify Brain Drain as the mental and physical exhaustion they feel at the close of a semester, it is actually used to describe the migration of highly trained people from one country to another and was the topic of this year's African and Caribbean Symposium (Nov. 16 and 17). Although this pattern is present in many societies (Canada, for example, regularly loses many of its most educated people to jobs in the United States), it has become a particular problem in Africa and the Caribbean, where the presence of doctors, teachers and technologically knowledgeable people is critical to the regions' ongoing development.

The situation in Africa appears grave indeed. David Horlacher, visiting professor of economics, noted that there is a continuous stream of Africans leaving their countries for North America, Western Europe and Australia. During the 1990s, an average of 20,000 people left Africa per year, with Egypt, Ghana and South Africa having the highest rates of exodus. Horlacher stressed that those persons leaving are a "very highly selected flow" often made up of the continent's best and brightest.

Recent years have seen the mass migration of African doctors, nurses, computer engineers and other professionals to more developed nations. Statistics indicate that the medical sector has been the hardest hit by this trend. An astounding 60 percent of Ghanan doctors have left the country. Twenty Kenyan doctors emigrate each month. In Zambia, there are now only 400 doctors in the entire nation — there were 1,800 30 years ago. A recent study in South Africa found that 65 percent of hospitals were having a difficult time finding trained people to fill their positions.

The Caribbean has experienced a similar drain in medical personnel. The United States, for one, regularly recruits nurses from Jamaica to fill its understaffed hospitals. However, the attraction of life abroad has also affected the availability of teachers in the region. Wealthier countries regularly advertise in Caribbean newspapers for trained teachers, offering them contracts and salaries that can be difficult to resist.

"Recruitment drive sort of preys on the health and education sectors," observed Elizabeth Thomas-Hope, head of the department of geography and geology at Jamaica's University of West Indies. However, she noted that since many of the visas offered last only a few years, there is a relatively high rate of return to the Caribbean, and those who do come back often bring skills that they can contribute to their native societies.

Still, what causes people to leave their homes for careers in other countries? The professors and student panelists spoke of "push" and "pull" factors that drive and lure people to emigrate. Moustapha Diouf, associate professor of sociology at the University of Vermont and a native of Senegal, noted that "there is a correlation between the state of [a country's] economy and the level of brain drain." Those nations where working conditions are poor, technology isn't advanced, governments are corrupt, funding for research is scarce and salaries are low are the most likely to experience high levels of emigration. He also noted that it is only natural that one be attracted to modernity and economic achievement. "You cannot blame people … for looking for better opportunities."

Shahan Mufti '03, who represented south Asia in the panel discussion of Brain Drain, identified another problem: people are not necessarily being educated in fields that allow them to find jobs in their countries. He gave the example of an abundance of Pakistani plastic surgeons that can't find appropriate work because what their country really needs is more general practitioners.

In the Caribbean, the push and pull factors are not economic alone. Thomas-Hope explained that because the tiny island "societies were created by global forces [of colonization]," the citizens are particularly interested in going abroad. She also commented on the consciousness of American power, saying that many Jamaican families "feel that if their kids are not in the United States they've somehow failed."

Many of the professionals who choose to emigrate have been educated in countries besides their own; however, a good number received their degrees in their homelands. An education abroad is enticing and can often lead to permanent employment in a high-paying job. While this is one form of brain drain, another that is equally, if not more, devastating occurs when people educated in their own nations — often on government money — leave. A U.N. development report found that in the 1990s, it cost $20,000 to put an African student through four years of university. Therefore, if 100,000 students leave, $2 billion are lost.

How can Brain Drain be combated? The professors and panelists discussed three approaches: encouraging or forcing people to return to their countries, recovering costs (taxing incomes earned abroad, for example) and developing a sort of diaspora. The last of these options, in which expatriates can stay abroad but network with their own country to support scholarship and development programs, proved to be the most popular.

Horlacher emphasized that "human capital belongs to the individual … not government or society … and the value of that capital depends on how productively it can be used." Rather, if a person's skills are of greater use abroad, it does not make sense to send him home. However, he should be certain to give back to his nation in another manner, whether by spending some time teaching there, funding a scholarship or working on other development projects.