Give us your best and brightest: Why are Africa’s best brains leaving?
9 min read
Experts chip in on the best way Africa can keep its best brains home, including offering incentives and starting a Pan-African university. Photo/FILE
Posted Monday, March 12 2012
IN SUMMARY
- Every year, thousands of Africans troop to the West, either for further studies or for better employment opportunities. Few ever come back to apply the skills acquired abroad, and now a new movement wants the global community to address this ‘injustice’. Among the proposals on the table is what they are calling the ‘Fifa-risation’ of the global academic and employment market, which means recipient countries will have to compensate African nations that lose their human capital to them
A little action goes unnoticed every time the KCSE results are released. The best and brightest KCSE examination performers set their sights on studying in some of the best universities in the world.
Statistics by the Ministry of Education show that few top KCSE students study in the country. For instance, between 1989 to 2001, all the best KCSE students received full scholarships to some of the world’s best universities, including the Ivy League colleges in the US.
A look at the Alliance High school website reinforces this trend. Few of its top students have studied in the country, and during the tenure of former Principal Chris Khaemba, about 20 or 30 students each year would receive full scholarships abroad.
For instance, on the website, the name of Dennis Ouma comes up often. Dennis was one of the top students in the 1989 KCSE, and went on to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), obtaining a PhD in just seven years.
He currently holds several engineering patents and resides in the US.
This situation is not unique to Kenya alone. Many African countries are grappling with the flight of their best and brightest professionals, a phenomenon more commonly known as brain drain.
The World Bank estimates that about 30,000 African PhD holders work outside the continent. The professionals cite many reasons as to why they leave the continent, but the chief reason seems to be lack of professional recognition and opportunities for career advancement and professional growth back home.
Take the case of Kenyan lecturers and doctors, for instance. They are always going on strike, citing poor pay and working conditions.
After fighting endlessly, some do give up eventually and leave for greener pastures abroad.
Evan Mwangi, a lecturer in the Literature Department at the University of Nairobi, after an unsuccessful lecturers’ strike in 2003, packed his bags and left for Ohio State University in the US, where he currently teaches.
Kilemi Mwiria, the current assistant minister for Higher Education, was at one time a UASU official, and after an unsuccessful lecturer’s strike in the 1990s, packed his bags for South Africa. He returned much later and decamped to politics.
In this, the science and engineering graduates fair the worst. There are hardly any decent science jobs on the continent. In fact, most science and engineering graduates end up working in the financial sector, joining banks and other financial institutions in some kind of internal brain drain.
It is proposed that African governments do more to keep the science brains in the continent.
For example, the Square Kilometre Array project (SKA), which South Africa is bidding for in competition with the likes of Australia, is envisioned as one of the projects that will help generate interest in young African scientists.
The project aims to construct several radio telescopes that will mimic the conditions of when the earth was formed, and find crucial clues to the early times of the Big Bang when, scientists believe, the earth was formed.
Another solution proposed is the ‘Fifa-risation’ of the continent’s academic rules. In such an arrangement, developed countries will pay transfer fees to the countries (and hopefully) universities, where the African scientists and professionals were trained.
This is much like the way Fifa operates, in that every time a team buys a new player, it compensates the club that trained the player.
The club also receives a sum of money every time the player is transferred to another club. As it stands now, the educational budgets of African and other Third World countries are nothing but supplements to the developed world, which end up using the brains and human resources that poor countries pay through the nose to train.
Since Africa cannot compete with the best universities and corporations in the world to retain such brilliant minds, they would be compensated, which, in turn, would boost the capacity back home.
One country that seems to be warming up to this approach is Ethiopia. Faced with the departure of its health workforce, it has increased the number of doctors and nurses trained by four times, such that even if the western countries poach and recruit some of its workforce, the country would still be left with an adequate workforce to solve its needs.
Still, another solution proposed has been the establishment of an elite Pan-African university, able to conduct research on a large scale and admit the best and brightest Africans.
One institution that is already doing this is the Johannesburg-based African Leadership Academy (ALA).
The school, although only a college preparatory and not a university, aims to inculcate leadership and research skills in its students, drawn from across the continent and beyond.
Its founders, Chris Bradford, Ghanaian Fred Swaniker and Cameroonian Dr Acha Leke, have a vision that the students will study in the best universities around the world and return to help solve the myriad issues bedevilling the continent.
The founders themselves have studied in the best universities in the world and hope to inspire the students to follow suit and return home.
A look at some of its current and former students reveals this trend. For instance, William Kamkwamba, a Malawian national, was able to build a wind turbine and help bring electricity to his rural home, which had never had electricity before.
He read books in the local library, which he was able to use to construct the wind turbine. Although his mother thought his son was going mad, he powered the family radio and lit a bulb, much to the astonishment of the village neighbours, who could hear the blistering noise from a house that was previously silent.
On that alone, he earned an automatic slot at ALA, and was recently admitted to Dartmouth College, an Ivy League College in the US. He has also met with erstwhile green world campaigners, among them former US Vice President Al-Gore.
However, critics point out that such a solution may not work out well. After all, the school, rather than halting brain drain, is accelerating the process by proving to be a good hiring ground for Western universities, from which few students would return home.
About 95 per cent of the students from the school have received full scholarships from elite Western universities.
Some also argue that assembling a group of students in an environment far removed from everyday Africa’s realities is hardly a panacea for the continent’s woes. After all, some of Africa’s biggest thieves were educated in the same elite universities; the Harvards, Yales and Oxfords of this world.
Others, however, view brain drain as beneficial in some ways. The exposure to advanced economies and Western markets does serve to open one’s eyes, something which a few African professionals have come back home and put to good use.
Take the case of Patrick Awuah. A Ghanaian national, he received a full scholarship to Swarthmore College, a private college in the US. He went on to work for Microsoft, and was one of the thousands of dollar millionaires churned out by Microsoft.
He enrolled for an MBA at the University of California-Berkeley, and together with his wife, whom he met at Microsoft, began to devise a business plan for a private college.
With their own savings and funding from former Microsoft employees, he set up Ashesi University, a private college that draws students from Ghana and West Africa in general.
He admits that the education he received in the US opened his eyes, and his work colleagues exposed him to many things that he would never have learnt at home.
Crucially, he was determined that his college would give a high focus to liberal arts education, which he believed fostered creativity, innovation and original thinking, something he says he wouldn’t have learnt from his own education system back home in Ghana, which he accuses of fostering rote learning at the expense of holistic learning.
Anther returnee, Ethiopian Eleni-Gebre, earned a PhD from Stanford University and worked for the World Food Programme.
She returned home and was instrumental in the setting up of the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange (ECX), which permits the exchange of agricultural products in much the same way shares are traded at the Nairobi Securities Exchange.
It cuts out middlemen who used to get the produce from farmers at desperate prices and sell it at exorbitant prices, leaving the farmers, the actual producers, poorer every year.
Although some have criticised ECX as being nothing more than a project of Meles Zenawi bound to control farmers, the project still stands, and many African countries are flocking to the country to learn about it.
In many African countries, the huge remittances by the African diaspora serve as important sources of foreign exchange. Kenya routinely earns over a billion dollars (approximately Sh80 billion) from remittances by Kenyans working overseas.
So much has the impact of remittances been that part of the reason for the booming real estate sector is the money being pumped in by our relatives abroad.
Kenyans, sensing that the US recession and Euro-zone crisis might mean their stay abroad is short-lived, are investing in buildings and properties, and are partly accounting for the high economic growth in recent years.
In some countries, the remittances are the only source of foreign exchange. Take Somaliland, for example, a semi-state whose request for international recognition has been thwarted many times by the United Nations for the fear that this would encourage secessionist movements elsewhere in Africa and beyond.
Although Somaliland is often confused with Somalia, it is a whole world different. The semblance of economic growth in the region can be attributed to Somali businessmen, taxi drivers and academics working in such foreign capitals as London, Washington and even Nairobi.
So much has been the flow of overseas money into Somaliland that several US banks recently refused to be financial intermediaries for channelling the money to there, fearing that some of the money may be finding its way to Al-Shabaab and other terrorist groups.
This has had a devastating effect on Somaliland, and its economic fortunes have begun faltering.
Critics of foreign remittances cite that such money is used for consumption and rarely for productive development. They point out that this encourages more dependence, no different from the Western aid money that has crippled the continent.
In her book, Dead Aid And Why There Is A New Way For Africa, Zambian economist Dr Dambisa Moyo argues against such aid, and sees it as the very reason for Africa’s underdevelopment.
In this, she goes against her former Harvard teacher, Dr Jeffery Sachs, who has been vocal in calling for the increase of aid flow to the continent. The book generated so much interest that Rwandan President Paul Kagame personally bought it for all the members of his Cabinet.
About Post Author
