|
EDITORIAL - What situations should prevail for the best of our owns to stay home? A very enlightened African, Amadou Mahtar Mbow, former - UNESCO director General said in October of this year in a seminar that "The African farmers, through their work and taxes, are those who fund the studies of these Africans who later stay and work in Europe or in the West instead of returning home to contribute to developing their countries” He was addressing of course the perennial issue of brain drain. I did some research on the internet and noticed to my shock that thousands of people have written endlessly on the subject of decades now. And hundreds of researches from an untold number of renowned institutes of the world have proven that it is a major contributing factor to the impoverished state of the African continent. But current figures show that the situation has only gone worse. According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), Africa has already lost one third of its human capital and is continuing to lose its skilled personnel at an increasing rate, with an estimated 20,000 doctors, university lecturers, engineers and other professionals leaving the continent annually since 1990. There are currently over 300,000 highly qualified Africans in the Diaspora, 30,000 of which have PhDs. At the same time, Africa spends US$4 billion per year (representing 35% of total official development aid to the continent) to employ some 100,000 Western experts performing functions generically described as technical assistance. For example, 90% of private firms in Gabon are managed by expatriates. Emigration of Skilled Africans to Industrialized Countries (based on IOM and ECA estimates) Africa as a whole counts only 20,000 scientists (3.6 % percent of the world total) and its share in the world’s scientific output has fallen from 0.5% to 0.3% as it continues to suffer the brain drain of scientists, engineers and technologists. The problem of brain drain has reached quite disturbing proportions in certain African countries, with Ethiopia ranked first in the continent in terms of rate of loss of human capital, followed by Nigeria and Ghana. I save you the endless figures. However you can find them anytime you key in ‘brain drain’ into any search engine. While my patriotic fiber will freely lashes out against brain drain
anytime and especially the brains in question, as an African living
in Africa, I must give credence to Amadou Mbow when he says Africa
lacks the attraction to stem the rising brain drain or lead students
back home at the end of their studies abroad. So I leave it open
for you, young enterprising Africans and future leaders of our
dear continent to sleep over it. What situations should prevail
for the
best of our owns to stay home and make things better for the future
generation? |
||