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| How African Govts Can Use Market Mechanism | |
24 Nov 2006
How African Govts Can Use Market Mechanism To Solve Brain Drain Problem.One of the issues we have been grappling with is at the capacity building workshop at the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) November 21-23, 2006 is brain drain. We have been talking about the various ways and forms to deal with this problem. I am of the opinion, and this is my personal opinion, that maybe African governments should try using the market mechanism in trying to deal with this problem in addition to formalizing the relationship between the flow of highly skilled people to Europe and North America. I am talking particularly about the skilled persons that were trained at public expense, especially doctors on whom the government spent a lot of money to train. It would be a good idea to formalize their leaving the continent and for them, in some way, to be able to pay for some of the resources that had been used to educate them. This would be applying the market mechanism. I will work because it is a simply a matter of supply and demand. But here I have to make distinction. I am talking about people who have been trained at public expense. This kind of thing is not going to apply to people who get trained privately, someone who goes to college and pays his own way, because he has not taken money from the public source. What I mean by formalizing the mechanism is that, even in the developed societies, when people go to school and they take loans, sometimes student loans from the government system, when they finish school, and they decide to work in Citibank in South America, for example, there is no problem. But they still have the obligation to pay back the loan. In the same way, in Africa, if people go to school with public funds, there should be a formal way that they should not be leaving their countries unilaterally. The government, through agreements with the developed countries, should be able to formalize the process, so that the government should be able to trace where they are, and then in a formal way, according to an agreed formula, be paying back some of this public money back to the respective government, which can used it for more educational needs. It looks to me that Africa has the comparative advantage in terms of training, in a very decent cost, compared to the amount that the developed countries use to train skills of the same cadre. Therefore, we should just trade skill as a commodity in order for African countries to reap benefits in the same way that we trade in cocoa or timber and so on. I think the governments can in this way be able to realize some revenue which they can plough back into the educational system. In the long-run, they might be the winner, and our governments will not be feeling bad in terms of brain drain. In the long run the idea is to have a free flow of labour in the same way that we are negotiating things at the World Trade Organization. I think that labour should be an item which we can discuss with our partners. We have also been looking at critically centre around whether capacity building or capacity development is really an issue or, as some participants indicated that it is actually a mind issue in the sense of what some people are calling latent capacity. This means that even in medical or health system, people are not working at their optimum capacity and that there is a need to take a critical look about the way we are approaching the problem and the way that we are using scarce resources of personnel to deal with this kind of problem. The workshops also critically looked at the way forward, I mean, what can be done in order to arrest the situation of brain drain. We have talked about policies towards trying to arrest the mindset about what Africans can do, how they can take their own initiatives. We have talked about how African governments can focus on using their own internal resources to solve African problems instead of depending on outside help because it seems that the agenda has been set by other people who do not have critical views about what is going on in the continent. In the long run we want to arrive at some form of paradyms on what can be done and what is possible and some kind of solutions in order to minimize the problems of capacity building in Africa. There were group discussions formed around some themes, which were decided at the workshop. They are some of what I just talked about: Africa trying to take care of its own business. Dr. H. Nyame-Mensah of NEPAD Department, and Chief Transport Economist of African Development Bank (AfDB) |
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