Brain Drain

As many of you know, I am from Nigeria. I was reading an article reecently about Nigeria, and the subject of "Brain Drain" was brought up. Brain Drain is simply a situation whereby the talented expertise in science, health and technology (and other areas) are leaving the country, and moving to Western countries where they have been offered better pay or better opportunities for their research etc. The main discussion was around doctors and researchers in health and science.

This phenomenon has been occuring in the country for over 20 years. In fact, more than half of doctors trained in Nigeria in the last 20 years practice outside the country, with over 21,000 of them in the US alone. This phenomenon has been blamed for a lot of the problems including deteriorating health care systems, problems in infrastructure etc. The case was made that after the country has trained the talent, they lose them to other countries.

There is still a lot of talented expertise left in the country, most of whom are not reaching their full potential. Many of them are making good livings and doing well for themselves, but the people who are needed to improve the society - the doctors, scientists and researchers. who actually want to make a difference, and come up with solutions are not able to do so, mostly because there is not really a system that further develops their talent.

There is no system or infrastrucutre that allows them to make good use of their talents and improve the societies that they live in. These doctors, scientists, technologists graduate form college and want to make a difference, maybe trying to provide solutions to various problems in the country, but they do not receive any funding from the government or from any sources in general. Even if they are paid, it is not at a competitive rate, so when a college in another country offers them an opportunity to do this, they take it.

So now, the question is what can be done? We have a country full of business men and women, engineers, scientists who are just working for some big company ( or themselves) to earn a living. But the people who could make the country a better place by developing solutions that the country needs are not given that opportunity, and are forced to leave the country. The big debate going on now is, how can that talent be retained. It is very easy to say, throw some money at it, but that really is not the solution, because it really goes back to asking where the money will come from. Most of these countries that can afford to swoop up this talent are huge developed countries like the UK and the US. These researchers develop solutions for them that made them even better.

A system needs to be developed for the country to provide resources to keep this talent. It will take many years, but we have to start small, maybe support just a few in the first year. It may lead to solutions that improve the country or even make a profit that can be reinvested and the cycle can continue.

This brian drain was the case with India years ago, and now India is becoming more developed and a lot of the talent is being retained now, so maybe we just need a huge boom in one sector of the economy to bring in a lot of money that can be invested in health and research.