By Olakunle Agboola – The African Union estimates that about 70,000 skilled professionals emigrate from Africa every year. Currently, Africa is the world’s youngest continent, with an estimated 10 -12 Million young Africans joining the labor force each year. Yet the continent can create only about 3 million jobs annually. With limited economic opportunities, many young Africans are migrating to Europe and America for economic opportunities.
Brain drain, is the emigration of skilled nationals and depletion of skilled human resources in the countries of origin. This is a bane that has been on for many years, not knowing when it will end. Almost every African wants to have a taste of Europe or America and today there is a huge community of Africans not only in America but also in Europe, Asia, and Australia.
Mayowa Oni, a Nigerian who now resides in London, is happy today for leaving Nigeria to Europe 15 years ago for a greener pasture.
”I can’t be happier than who I am today for making the right choice of leaving Nigeria to Europe 15 years ago. I could have been frustrated or died if I am still living in Nigeria up till now. I finished university in Nigeria as one of the best students in my class and I thought getting a job would be very easy not knowing it was a lovely delusion. Being the first born of the family, a lot of responsibility is upon me, and not when I lost my father at the tender age of 10 years. Life was not funny, with only my mother who struggled to train me in the University with the hope that I will assist her in sending my other siblings to school. I could not help her for five years withering at home until I made up my mind that I must leave the country and find better opportunities abroad. Cutting the long story short, I left Nigeria to Europe which was a great blessing because today, I have all my family in London including my mother and we are all fine. I don’t have anything to do in Nigeria again but I always pray that God will remove those wicked politicians who have nothing good to offer Nigeria. Today I am a software Engineers and I work with a leading software company in Europe”.
Mayowa Oni is one out of many Africans who have migrated from Africa and doing so well abroad. Also, Patrick Jones is a trained Medical surgeon in Ghana but he is currently putting his papers together to find a better opportunity in America, precisely Texas.
”Olakunle, I like all you do and I have read a lot of your articles procuring solutions to Africa’s quandary. I have a huge concern for Africa because we can’t continue like this. Most of our politicians in Ghana and most African countries, would rather travel to Europe to treat common headaches and you wonder why we can’t have a good hospital in Africa. I grew up with my father telling me the story of the University Teaching Hospital (UCH)in Ibadan and that is your home country Nigeria. He told me that the Saudi Royal family used to frequent UCH for medical treatment in the sixties and not only that, countless expatriates and whites from the University of Ibadan, were comfortable with UCH because it was the best in Africa. You know what UCH is right now and I don’t have to start telling you the story. Most of my colleagues have left Ghana to Europe and America and I know what they have become advancing their medical profession. I will mess up my life and waste away proving my loyalty to Africa, if I do not find my way to America’’.
Meanwhile, in 2019, the number of African-trained International Medical Graduates (IMG) practicing in the US alone reached 20,584 – a 30.1% increase from 2015. This is equivalent to about one or two African-educated physicians migrating to the US per day over the past four years. In 2019, 90.0% of all African-educated physicians working in the US were trained in Egypt, Ghana, Nigeria, and South Africa.
On average, it cost each African country between $21,000 and $59,000 to train a medical doctor. Nine countries – Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe – have lost more than $2.0 billion since 2010 for training doctors who then migrated. Annually, it is estimated that Africa loses around $2.0 billion through brain drain in the health sector alone.
Destination countries do not pay for the cost of training African doctors they recruit. For instance, one in ten doctors working in the UK comes from Africa, allowing the UK to save on average $2.7 billion on training costs. Similarly, the US, Australia, and Canada save respectively about $846 million, $621 million, and $384 million in training costs from African physicians they recruit. It is estimated that Africa has lost $4.6 billion in training costs for home-trained doctors, recruited by these four-top destination countries.
Can Africa overturn this trend which is not only apparent in the health sector but also in the educational sector where Africa continues to have huge migration to Europe and America? How possible it is to get back to the 1960s and 1970s, where Africa had some of the finest universities and migration through education was not what it is today. Ahmadu Bello University Zaria had the first world-class computer center in Africa. The University of Ife had a notable pool of expertise in nuclear physics. The University of Ibadan had an international reputation as a leading center of excellence in tropical medicine, development economics, and the historical sciences. British Nobel laureate, Dorothy Hodgkin, once noted that the University of Lagos was one of the world hubs of expertise in her specialist field of Chemical Crystallography.
A steep decline in funding, political indifference, corruption, and widespread conflicts created conditions in which the opportunity to pursue professional careers were stunted in most universities in Africa. The alternatives have been Europe, Australia, and America, while Asia is recently becoming popular.
Prof. Purity Mugambi, from Kenya, believes that there is a massive brain drain from Africa having, one-third of all African scientists in developed countries. And this outflow to him represents, a significant loss of economic potential for the continent, especially in today’s global society where scientific and technological knowledge drive development.
”I think that higher education throughout Africa must be revitalized. Universities have been hollowed out by decades of brain drain and now find themselves severely handicapped by dilapidated facilities and inadequately trained staff. I won’t blame students, researchers, or scientists migrating to developed countries. They have the right to go to where the best career opportunities prevaricate and that means Africa must wake up or else we keep on losing our best brains to the modern colonial emperors.
Today, African doctors, scientists, and engineers are making massive contributions in Europe, America, Australia, and Asia. You must have heard about Philip Emeagwali who won the 1989 Gordon Bell Award for his work in super-computing. Jelani Aliyu designed the first electric car for American automobile giant, General Motors. Olufunmilayo Olopede, Professor of Medicine at the University of Chicago, won a McArthur Genius Award for her work on cancer. Anne Marie Imafidon earned her Oxford Masters’ in Mathematics and Computer Science when she was only 19. Today, she sits on several corporate boards and was awarded an MBE in 2017 for services to science. The lists are endless for Africans contribution abroad”.
There is a need to find a way to curb brain drain in Africa. These include generating gender-responsive economic development programs, to provide gainful employment, professional development, and educational opportunities to qualified nationals in their home countries. While African countries must put in place the necessary mechanisms, to implement these recommendations, they will have to be complemented by adherence to meritocratic recruitment procedures, development of infrastructure, and provision of incentive mechanisms to attract and retain highly qualified African nationals.
President Obama once addressed the issue of brain drain in Africa in one of his visits to South Africa, “If we have African leaders, governments, and institutions which are creating a platform for success and opportunity, then you will increasingly get more talent wanting to stay in Africa while brain drain will gradually fade away. Similarly, as President of the African Development Bank, Akinwumi Adesina remarked at the G7 Summit in 2017,” The future of Africa’s youth does not lie in migration to Europe; it should not be at the bottom of the Mediterranean; it lies in a prosperous Africa. We must create greater economic opportunities for our youths right at home in Africa to stop them drifting to Europe and America”.
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