The main resources to move Africa ahead is the creativity of its human resources, but Africa is losing its human capital at such an alarming rate that some observers say the continent is dying “a slow death from brain drain”. A brain drain is said to occur when a country becomes short of skills when people with such expertise emigrate. United Nations has called the brain drain “the most serious threat to the economic development of sub Saharan Africa”. It has, infact, reached such a level of crisis that it is being compared to the effect of femines, civil wars and even AIDS. According to International Organization for Migration, Africa has already lost one-third of its human capital.

It was thus better, they said, for African scientists, engineers, doctors, professors, entrepreneurs and senior managers to be out the continent. Such people would otherwise be unemployed, underemployed, and under-utilized and perhaps persecuted in Africa. Outside, they can work at prestigious hospitals; universities, laboratories, institutions and technological progress; earn a decent income and send remittance to Africa. This way, they will not only support their poor families back home, but also contribute to the gross domestic product of their countries through remittances that come in foreign currency; of which Africa is permanently short.

The challenges of establishing the necessary political conditions to retain and re-attract skilled personnel are daunting. While on one hand some countries are beginning to recover, on the other, some are engulfed in renewed crises.

In Kenya, The new government of President Mwai Kibaki has spawned a period of euphoria and a wave of returns by exiles hoping to rebuild a country that had all but collapsed under the weight of 24 years of rule by former president Daniel arap Moi. President Kibaki has been quick to invite Kenyans “who have been hounded out of our shores by repressive policies of our predecessors to come back home and join us in nation-building.” He notes that the country desperately needs “the genius of its citizens wherever they are.” On the other hand, Cote d`Ivoire, once a Migrant’s haven in West Africa, has recently been embroiled in civil war. Another of the continent’s better – managed economies, Zimbabwe, which also used to draw African immigrants in search of opportunities, is seeing a mass exodus of professionals under the current economic and political crisis.

The Zimbabwe National Association of social workers estimates that 1,500 of the country’s 3,000 trained social workers left for the UK during the last 10 years. Africans, who became professors overseas, could not return home, as they had nowhere to ply their trade. In many other African countries, educational institutions are poorly funded and resourced, while there are few private sector jobs. Although they promise to redress such shortcomings, governments still spend very little on specialized areas such as science and technology. The continent’s share of investment in research and development is only 0.5 per cent of the global total and it spends 0.8 per cent of the world total on scientific publications.

The strength of currency in African countries also increases the level of brain drain in Africa’s development, certainly, Africans in the diaspora are major contributors to Africa’s Economy. For example, 4.1 per cent of Nigeria’s GDP comes from remittances, while Eritrea gets some 16.7 per cent of its GDP from this source. Remittances are particularly important since they go straight into the pockets of individuals and families who use the money for basic necessities.

However, the myth created around remittances has for long masked the real cost of brain drain to Africa. Africa employs over 100,000 expatriate professionals at a cost of $4 billion a year to replace the departing African professionals. In other words, for every two African professionals who are outside, Africa employs one expatriate at a much higher salary. Worse, Africa gets little return from its investment in higher education since the graduates who emigrate give little or nothing back to their societies.

In Kenya it costs nearly $40,000 to train a doctor and $10,000 to $ 15,000 to educate a university student for four years. This has led some to say that Africa’s budget for higher education is actually a large subsidy to the education budget of western governments that receive these graduates. Africa’s health and social services are crumbling as skilled professionals leave in droves. The Kenyan Medical Association is warning that brain drain is threatening the very existence of the country’s health services. One-third of Ethiopia’s medical doctors has already left the country. Zambia had 1,600 doctors not too long ago; but recently observers estimated the remaining doctors to approximately 400. So also 60 per cent of Ghana’s graduating doctors left the country in 1980s.

The story is no better spheres. Zimbabwe’s respected mining industry has lost one-third of its skilled manpower. South Africa, which has benefited from the arrival of professionals from other parts of Africa, is losing many of its own-and the rate of exodus may well increase. Given its remarkable survival skills, Africa might show its ability, once more, to deal with yet another crisis. During the last two decades, African governments and institutions have launched several programs and offered incentives to slow down or even reverse Africa’s brain drain. In both cases, the results were disappointing. Few returned, and many continued to leave.

Until recently, African government had expressed little concern about the loss of skilled people, while development lending agencies often compounded the problem by obliging recipient countries to hire foreign expatriates, as part of the conditions attached to those loans. Moreover, politicians often portrayed countrymen who opted to work and live abroad as unpatriotic. But the sharp rise in skilled emigration and the serious human resources constraints facing the continent have forced many to rethink their views.

Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo is one of the leaders actively attempting to address the challenges of the brain drain. On his trips abroad, president Obasanjo often meets professionals and intellectuals who have left Nigeria to ask them how they can contribute to their country’s development. President Obasanjo also is one of the architects of the continent’s new development framework, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD).

The New Partnership calls for the establishment of reliable, continental database to determine the magnitude of the problem and promote collaboration between Africans abroad and those at home. An important NEPAD priority is to develop Africa’s human resources and reverse the brain drain. Under NEPAD, African leaders explicitly call for the creation of the “necessary political, social and economic conditions that would serve as incentives to curb the brain drain involve the physical relocation of expatriate Africans either to their home countries or elsewhere on the continent. A major limitation, however, is that such operation require large sums of money. Some expatriates may wish to be repatriated with their entire families. Others may request salaries comparable to what they earn in their host countries, along with up-to-date technological resources that most African country cannot afford. Another limitation is that repatriation only allows for the return of the individual expatriate and not the knowledge networks to which he or she may belong.

Despite such challenges, the Kenya – based Research and Development Forum for science – Led Development in Africa (RANDFORUM) has been exploring ways to repatriate African professionals and intellectuals, as requested in 1999 by the presidential forum on the management of Science and Technology in Africa. In a grouping of African heads of state, that year, a task force led by the former Zambian president, Dr Kenneth Kaunda, recommended that RANDFORUM project aims to relocate professionals from “distressed countries” those that are faltering economically or politically, such as Liberia or Somalia and Algeria, to where they can be productive. Rather than confine professionals and intellectuals from such countries to refugee camps, they are utilized elsewhere and returned once the situation in their countries normalizes.

Given the international nature of the brain drain and the covert support it receives from developed countries in need of skilled personnel, measures in African countries to contain it will only succeed with the support of the destination countries. The international community needs to put pressure on developed nations to modify existing policies on the immigration of professionals from developing countries.

Industrialized countries are in growing need of two types of immigrant labour, those willing to do poorly paid, dirty and dangerous jobs that their own nationals scorn, and highly specialized professionals, such as software specialists, engineers, doctors and nurses. Industrialized nations have embarked on massive international recruitment drives.

South Africa recently had to appeal to the government of Canada to desist from recruiting its medical professionals. In rural province of Saskatchewan, Canada, more than 50 per cent of doctors are foreign trained and at least 1 in 5 of the 1,530 doctors there earned their first medical degree in South Africa.

However, it may become even tougher to stem the outward flow of skilled professionals from developing countries in future with falling birth rates and aging populations, demand for labour in Northern countries is forecast to grow, as younger people are needed to maintain productivity. In poorer countries, millions will continue to seek opportunities in richer countries to find better paying jobs and raise their standards of living. And in a globalizing world, where the dominant economic paradigm promotes the free movement of capital, it will become increasingly difficult to restrict the free movement of skilled labour.

The African Union has invited Africa’s diaspora (those who trace their roots back to the continent) to actively take part in the region’s development. Heads of States who met for the African Union extraordinary summit agreed to amend the organization’s charter to encourage the full participation of the African diaspora as an important part of the continent’s development.

The US Ambassador to Nigeria Howard Jeter remarked in an address to the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs, “Africa must develop a collective strategy for engaging the diasporas.” He said there have been no meaningful attempts to engage the diaspora and no institutional connections exist. “ Few African–Americans knows about NEPAD. Why should that be? Asked Ambassador Jeter. He also observed that Africa is not utilizing African–Americans as a primary political constituency in the US. “Are African–Americans really being encouraged to do business with Africa? I don’t think so.” He noted. As Africa begins to map out a strategy to engage those in the diaspora, such questions need to be asked, he said.

Experts on the continent are increasingly engaged in strategies and programmes to reverse the brain drain or retain skilled professionals at home. They include restrictive policies aimed at delaying emigration, such as adding extra years to medical students’ training. Various tax proposals have been put forward as governments realize that the large numbers of citizens living outside their borders are a potential economic resource. Proposals range from one-time taxes to bilateral tax arrangements, which would require the receiving nations to tax citizens of another and remunerate the home country.

Another strategy is the adoption of international agreements by industrial and developing nations under which wealthy countries pledge not to recruit skilled people from developing states. However, the two most popular strategies involve transferring skills through networks of professionals and intellectuals and the time-tested approach of repatriation.

A lot of people or companies from the Industrialised world are behind the crisis in most African countries, because of their natural resources or manpower they needed to develop their nation/continent, despite all the resources they exploit from the continent. Africa is still nothing but third world. We should not be submissive to all these attacks by these sets of people who have come to destroy the continent, because of the money or equipments they are offering our government on our resources. For example a country like Angola was into such situation few years ago, the crisis they suffered was basically on their natural resources, caused by the same greedy and wicked set of people, who do not belong to neither the country nor the continent.

It is advised that The African Union should set up a committee that will face all the challenges of losing our intelligentsia to industrialized world, and create an avenue to which African governments who are willing to employ experts from overseas should employ African experts living abroad, either from their country or not. This will really encourage most African experts abroad to return home. For example the situation is South Africa is a good example, South Africa replaces their departing doctors with doctors from other parts of Africa.