More on brain drain
Building upon the two new ‘brain drain’ reports we discussed earlier, Ethan Zuckerman has an excellent post up on the medical brain drain from Africa:
Looking at national databases of physicians in the US, UK, Canada and Australia, [Dr. Fitzhugh Mulla] discovers that 23 to 28% of new physicians studied medicine outside the country where they are practicing. Of those emigré physicians, 40-75% are from lower income countries. This means that many nations are exporting a large portion of their trained physicians - of the 20 countries who export the highest number of physicians proportional to the number trained, 9 are in the Carribean or Sub-Saharan Africa.
But there is hope:
Some African nations are demonstrating that they can bring back business talent by creating environments for entrepreneurship - many of the Ghanaian entrepreneurs I know lived and worked in the US or the UK, developed robust business skills and some capital, and came home to start businesses when the environment looked sufficiently promising.
Which begs the question:
Is it fair to expect African nations to spend sufficient money on their national health services that they can attract doctors to stay home? Or do the US and other nations need to take some responsibility for ensuring they don’t leave poor nations devoid of trained medical professionals?
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I am a urologist and practicing medicine in Nigeria for the past 27 years. I have been the president of the umbrella association of private medical doctors in Nigeria (caters for 70%of Nigeria health) and hence I can authoritatively tell you why there is high medical brain drain from Nigeria.Both the government and people of Nigeria have only little knowledge about the number and types of specialist doctors in Nigeria. I just wrote a book to partly educate people on this. The goverment does not protect the intellectual and professional assets of these physicians because quacks are not controlled. In effect, there is inadequate patronage of these physicians. There are no credit facilities of any type available in Nigeria. Even the World Bank's IFC does NOT help physicians because it insists we must have about 25% of the loan sought for. The minimum loan is $250,000 which is too much for the average physician.In a situation where quacks compete with physicians and there is ZERO investment capital and both international organizations and our governments IGNORE us, the least resistane is emigration.I bet you that if African professionals have access to ivestible credit like our colleagues in the west, emigration will be greately curtailed.
Posted by: Dr. Gabriel Ogah | Nov 2, 2005 2:59:54 PM