Brain Drain poses A Dire Threat to Poor Third World African Countries Development.

Brain drain is a very dire and serious threat to the technological advancement of the innumerable countries in the developing world. It is a problem that should be tackled internationally perhaps at the level of the Millennium Development Goals, MDG’s. This is due to the debilitating effect this brain drain is having in these countries pursuit to achieve the already enumerated and set out MDG’s.

MDG’s

The second MDG talks about achieving Universal Primary Education. And among the sentences of the MDG’s script one says “somewhere where anyone can get a good education and healthcare”. It therefore defeats the letter and spirit of these words if the people who posses advanced, education are being continually poached and snatched  at an alarming rate by the richer more advanced predominantly western developed countries.

A case in point is the steadily increasing numbers of health workers from the Third World moving onwards largely to the United Kingdom and North America. This brain drain is immoral because the patient to doctor ratio in a poor country like Malawi is 100,000 to 1 while that in the United States is a comforting 440 to 1.

Seeking Greener Pastures

Therefore when one doctor leaves Malawi to “seek greener pastures” in the US 100,000 poor Malawians are left much the worse off as they will be losing a highly qualified and well trained healthcare professional who would have otherwise literally saved thousands of lives. This is compounded by the fact that Malawi suffers one of if not the world’s highest rates of HIV/AIDS and Infant Mortality rates due to curable diseases like Malaria and waterborne diseases.

This massive exodus of their most talented, experienced and educated citizens in other vital areas like engineering, Information and Countries Technology, ICT, means that these countries are ill equipped to develop key infrastructure projects needed in the New Economy.

One Million Skilled Immigrants.

According to a report by the United Nations Conference on Trade, UNCTAD, around one million skilled people from officially designated Least Developed Countries (LDC’s) lived and worked in developed countries in 2004; this is a brain drain level of 15% of the people with university-level education in those countries. It further states that the worlds 50 LDC’s are more affected by brain drain than developing countries in general where the rate is below 8%.

In some of these LDC’s the brain drain rate has reached truly cataclysmic proportions with some five countries in particular- Samoa, The Gambia, Cape Verde, Haiti and Somalia losing more the 50% of their university-level educated Professionals. The UNCTAD paper further observes that without enough trained Engineers, Scientists, Doctors, Nurses and Information and Communication Technology Professionals then it is well nigh impossible for the firms and farms of LDC’s to use technology to upgrade their products and efficiency.