Africa’s brain drain: How Africa can benefit from its best brains abroad.

Talent is the new capital in the present world. Ideas, rather than physical goods, are what will mark countries apart. According to the late great management guru Peter Drucker, we are now in the age of the knowledge economy. For Africa to advance then, it has to be able to make sure that it benefits from its best brains who are at home and abroad. Every year, Africa loses its best brains to the rest of the world, who mostly go on to pursue lucrative careers in Western countries. According to the World Bank, there are currently over 30,000 African PhD holders that work outside Africa. How then can the continent combat brain drain, and even benefit from it?

The first step is to realize that we cannot completely prevent these bright professionals from leaving Africa. How then can we remedy the situation and ensure that Africa gets to benefit from these brilliant minds abroad? It would first be important to understand how the wave of brain drain from Africa occurs.

The first wave of brain drain occurs just after high school or university, when brilliant minds in African high

schools and universities are enticed with full scholarships. When faced with the choice of whether to attend a university at home or abroad, many African youngsters would readily choose to attend the overseas university. This comes even as African universities are struggling with inadequate funding from their governments and industrial strikes by lecturers and students alike becomes common. Although many such youngsters leave with the intention of coming back, this rarely happens.

Finally, the last, and perhaps most devastating loss of brilliant African minds occurs at the professional level. In this then, African universities subsidize the cost of educating professionals who would otherwise end up working in Western countries. To remedy such a situation, some countries such as Ethiopia have increased the number of trained nurses and doctors by four times. In such a situation, even if many nurses and doctors would leave, there would still be enough health professionals to take care of the Ethiopian health system.

Another way that Africa can combat brain drain is to ensure that it engages with its professionals abroad. The diaspora communities are so much important and indispensable to the African renaissance story that they should not be ignored. They send money back home, which helps to sustain their families. However, most of these remittances are used for consumption rather than productive endeavors, and African governments could do more to ensure that they channel these remittances to the correct uses. Moreover, the cost of remittance must be brought down, so that more money reaches the African consumers. According to a report by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), Africa is the most expensive place to send money to, and more should be done to ensure that the cost of remittances falls down.

Still, African countries could demand for a FIFArisation of the rules of human capital transfer. This loosely follows the model that is used football clubs in the buying and selling of players. When a club wants a player from a certain club, it has to pay a certain fee, which cater for the costs of training. Similarly, African countries could demand compensation from Western countries for the professionals trained in Africa.

The era when diaspora African brains were considered as traitors and sell outs is long gone. These days, the world has become a global village, and we shouldn’t expect that all African professionals will stay within Africa. Indeed, even a small amount of brain drain is to be encouraged, as it leads to a cross fertilization of ideas. 

Take the case of Ghanaian Patrick Awuah for example. As a teenager, he went to the United States on a full scholarship from Swarthmore University. He later went on to work at Microsoft for a number of years, and was one of the thousands of millionaires churned out by Microsoft. He later enrolled for an MBA at UC Berkely, United States. With help from his former Microsoft colleagues, he founded Ashesi University, in Accra Ghana. Ashesi’s mission is to be a university that trains young African minds in the liberal Arts, and to this end, the university hopes to train the next generation of African leaders. The university admits the brightest students from West Africa and beyond. Mr. Awuah credits the liberal Arts education he got at Swarthmore as being instrumental in setting up Ashesi University. 

As Awuah’s example shows, a little brain drain is indeed desirable. What we must acknowledge is that in their own little way, the African professionals abroad are helping to build mother Africa one day at a time, regardless of their distance from home.