A Nation Loses Its Professionals

Two weeks ago, the Kenyan men lost their hold on the Boston marathon for the first time in 14 years. To comfort them, Kenyans quoted the Swahili proverb “kuteleza sio kuanguka:” to slip is not to fall. In other words, this is just a momentary setback, and life is a marathon, not a sprint. As their countrymen make light of the second-place position though, there is disquiet over a deeper problem. Kenya declined in international position, especially in the last Olympics, due to defection of its runners.

Defection sounds like a bad word, but in reality the runners may still be patriotic as ever. They just moved on to greener pastures. When the commonwealth gold medalist, Stephen Cherono, moved to Qatar, there was uproar in Kenya, especially when he, as Saif Saeed Shaheen, went on to beat his former teammates at the Paris athletics championships. More recently, Bernard Lagat became a U.S. citizen, again amid further protest. Now, many wonder whether these athletes should be allowed to compete for their new host nations.

Far more worrisome than the loss of athletes and prestige is the loss of professionals that is occurring concurrently. Statistics show that sub-Saharan Africa has registered slower growth than any other region in the world, but this data fails to note that there are more African engineers in Europe and America than in Africa. A continent simply cannot grow without professionals.

When a country loses a doctor, it is not just the income from the individual’s earnings that is lost. The income from all the people who die of treatable ailments or whose efficiency is reduced by poor healthcare is lost as well. Similarly, an engineer would have built a bridge that improved transport and would have had a multiplying effect in increasing efficiency in the economy. Brain drain is thus not about national prestige; it is a real hindrance to growth in the developing world. For all the hype about halving poverty in the developing world, little will be done without a competent, sizeable workforce.

It may seem that developing nations are helpless in fighting the drain. Increasing monetary benefits for professionals to match the terms of developed economies is not an option for many affected countries. Increasing restrictions on emigration will not be effective either unless there is also a restriction on travel. Even if it were to work for a period, the global consensus is that a closed-off system will not help a country develop.

One way to slow brain drain is to raise national loyalty by increasing incentives, for example. the government could offer scholarships to foreign universities on the condition that students come back and work for a period. Another would be to set up avenues for expatriates to invest in their home country and participate in the running of their country, giving them a sense of ownership. Of course, encouraging good governance and stability are precursors to growth and retention of professionals, so all advances made in that direction will be profitable. Or, nations could follow the lead of Albania, which has instituted a policy that awards preference to foreign-trained students if there is a tie for a job position. Those who train and even live elsewhere are then not being treated as traitors or outsiders, but as part of society. Finally, developing countries might also revise their constitutions to allow for dual citizenship. This provides an exit for an athlete or professional caught between changing citizenship in order to qualify for a job and giving up his heritage and nationality.

As a regional body in an affected region, the African Union (AU) has undertaken this task of repatriating intellectual capital to the continent. In March, the AU organized the first conference of professionals from Africa and the Diaspora in Dakar, Senegal. This gave the development economists, doctors, and lawyers of Africa who are working abroad a chance to influence policy in their continent and thus own it once again. This is by far a more effective way of gaining loyalty than patriotic propaganda. The AU encourages accountability in governments at home as well, giving citizens a sense of ownership for the state.

One factor that aggravates brain drain is the pyramidal nature of education systems in most third-world countries. In Kenya for example, in any year, only about 15 biochemical engineers and 100 doctors graduate in the undergraduate system. This is in spite of having 800,000 students enroll in first grade annually. In this system, losing a biochemical engineer is a huge blow to the economy. Developing nations need to soften this effect by setting up vocational training institutes teaching modern skills such as computer programming, accounting, and hardware maintenance so as to harness this workforce. Nelson Mandela’s proposal of setting up AU-run regional universities all over Africa would do this and more. The universities would be an avenue by which expatriates could contribute, either by teaching there or by funding them. Furthermore, the colleges will be hubs for teaching and research.

Brain drain is a challenge not adequately recognized by developed economies. It may not literally kill, but it is responsible for a significant amount of growth stagnation and suffering for poor nations. It is time that this topic moved from boardrooms into actual research and that existing research was converted into policy. Without this, the millennium development goals shall remain a pipe dream, yet another promise made to the next generation that is broken.

Hillary M. Mutisya ’07 is an applied mathematics concentrator in Quincy House.