Can West Africa Curb Its Brain Drain?
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There's an assumption that a new generation stepping out into the job market will bring with them fresh ideas and new energy, paving the path forward for their country's future.

But what if that generation of young people took all of their skills somewhere else? This is called brain drain. It's the outflow of essential minds from countries to regions with more opportunity. Today, this drain is emerging as a major concern for the future of West Africa, where talented and capable professionals, doctors, engineers are leaving their home countries.

Among the concerns of this brain drain is that the future of Africa will be left to a new wave of military leaders, rather than an aspiring professional class.

The future prosperity of the world's youngest continent is at risk if it loses its talent. The contagion effect, where corruption, coups, and lack of economic opportunity lead people to leave, driving further instability, could make matters even worse. I'm Gabrielle Sierra, and this is Why It Matters. Today, can West African countries escape this vicious brain drain cycle?

The emigration of expertise out of Africa, not just in terms of brain, in terms of the medical doctor, the nurses, the architects, the lawyers, the engineers. That's the classic definition of brain drain. It is true. But what tends to get left out of the conversation is also the brown drain, right? Professional footballers, plumbers,

This is Ebenezer Obadare. I'm the Douglas Dillon Senior Fellow for Africa Studies here at the Council on Foreign Relations. I like to say that I cover everything under the African sun. Every young person who thinks there's no future ahead for them wants to leave, which is why if you look at the numbers, at the demographic of people in the border with Mexico trying to cross over into the United States, and the increasing number of those people are young Africans.

Nigerians, Senegalese, Gambians, Sierra Leoneans who have stowed away on ships and just look for different opportunities to live because they want better opportunities for themselves. So that's your brain drain right there. But I think it's worth emphasizing that we shouldn't just focus on the brain. Increasingly, the brain is also becoming very important.

More than 10 million West Africans left their home countries in 2020. While two out of three migrants stay on the continent, a growing number are moving to the United States and Europe. The share of West African immigrants residing in North America has tripled in the past three decades.

The majority immigrate legally, but an increasing number are coming through irregular channels. 59,000 African migrants were detained at the U.S.-Mexico border last year, more than four times as many as in 2022. Three of the four largest origin countries were in West Africa.

And it's not just highly educated people that are included in those statistics. There's also been an increase in what Ebenezer calls a "bron drain." The result is a climate in which a huge proportion of the population is considering leaving.

A few years ago, we did this episode and it was called The Future is African. And it's about how a population boom in Africa could make it much more of a powerful force in the world. You know, you're on the ground speaking to people every day. What's the feeling in the air on staying or leaving?

When we conceptualize migration, we think of people arriving on boats, people, you know, taking incredibly difficult journeys across the desert to get to Libya and then trying to get to Europe or people going through the Darien Gap to get to the United States. This is a new Adioye. I am the West Africa correspondent for the Financial Times. I'm based in Lagos. That basically just means I cover West Africa for the FT and parts of Central Africa as well.

But you know, you see situations in West Africa particularly where most people who are young, middle class and educated want to leave the country because there's a shortage of skilled workers globally. And so if you're a doctor or you're an engineer or you're a nurse, in one of these countries, there's a good chance that there's a country somewhere else that could use your talent, that could use your skills.

Young people across various professional fields, especially from the medical and tech sectors, seek greener pastures in European countries with no plans of return. The impact of brain drain on Africa's health sector is severe. Doctors and nurses are leaving in large numbers, leading to critical shortages in countries like Nigeria, Ghana and Zimbabwe.

So what do we need to know about Africa's migration movement right now?

One is to actually just the sheer numbers of young people, not just in West Africa, but Africa in general. Africa is, by all accounts, the world's youngest continent. The average age is 19. So what that means is that there is tremendous pressure for those young people to succeed, to do things that they see young people in other parts of the world doing.

That's bringing a lot of positive pressure on the government in West African countries in terms of politics, pressure for transparency, for popular representation, and all of that. How are those countries doing? Are they meeting young people's expectations? Do young people see their future in those respective countries? The answer to that is young people are frustrated because when they look around them, they don't see any future ahead for them.

And essentially, most people have decided that they're going to vote with your feet.

And we've seen this exodus of particularly, again, young, middle-class, educated. Because migrating, quote-unquote, legally is not cheap, it's expensive. And so you have that strand of people who have decided to leave. And there's also the people who, you know, maybe they're not as educated or they don't have the resources to migrate, are also thinking of migrating. Because obviously, if the middle class is being squeezed,

it's going to be worse for people who are struggling to begin with. This isn't a new story. West Africa has seen waves of emigration in recent years, especially post-pandemic. In the West African country, Cameroon, one third of all medical graduates left the country last year. And the number of nurses and midwives in the country is now at its lowest point in more than 20 years.

This dynamic plays out all across the globe, sometimes to the benefit of the United States and other wealthy countries, which have often been the recipient of those professionals. But it comes at an important cost to the source countries and regions. And this cost is rising in West Africa as the region experiences coups, a worsening economic outlook, and an overall lack of opportunity. Do you think that brain drain is self-reinforcing?

It can be, why do people want to come to the United States? Why do people want to go to Canada? Why do people want to go to the UK? Why are people fleeing Zimbabwe? Why are people fleeing South Africa? Outside Africa, why are people fleeing Venezuela? The common denominator in the countries where people are fleeing is failure of governance.

collapse of infrastructure and the perception that there is no future for young people in those countries. Once you attend to all those three factors, then you can arrest the situation. That's where they're living. I was just looking at numbers the other day, and it's not just young people as in people in 1920, but

people within the 20 to 35 belt. There's a New York Times story that I read about Senegal, where someone went to an elementary school and was spoken to young people. And then in a particular classroom of about 25 to 30 students, he asked the question, "How many of you want to leave?"

And I think the entire class raised their hand and it was like, wow, this is not good. So your attention is then drawn to the fundamental question as to why. And I think you don't have to look far and wide for the answer to that question. It's about the poor quality of governance in many African countries.

According to a survey conducted in 2022, over half of Africans aged 18 to 24 are likely to consider emigrating in the next few years, citing economic hardship and lack of educational opportunities as their top reasons. Not to sound cold, but we're here at Why It Matters. You know, I'm sitting here in the U.S. Why should this brain drain matter to people outside of West Africa?

It's a very important question. Every now and then, conversation about Africa comes on the table and is punctuated with a concern for the future of Africa. Whether you're talking broadly about development or you're talking about democracy, you're talking about political reforms, you are interested in the progress that African countries have to make in the immediate future. If all those plans are going to succeed,

According to a 2023 Freedom House report, the country with the steepest decline in freedom over the past decade is the West African nation Burkina Faso.

And making the top 10 alongside it were fellow West African states Guinea and Mali, both of which experienced coups in 2021. But political unrest isn't the only thing hindering the region's development. Long before severe floods inundated the region and destroyed crucial crops in 2022, West Africa was already facing its worst food crisis in 10 years, with more than 27 million people facing food insecurity.

A combination of these factors has kept West Africa far below averages on many development indicators. And if this cycle of brain drain continues, that development will continue to be hindered. You need expertise.

So there's no grand policy reform that we invest in from the point of view of not just the United States, from the West, that will not require having highly skilled people to execute them. In the educational sector, you're going to need qualified PhDs and professors. You're going to need doctors. You're going to need nurses. You're going to need all sorts of technicians. It then matters that people

Those abilities, that expertise, that know-how is kept in Africa, right? Not because we don't want migration. I'm not saying migration to the West should be restricted. But if we really want the best for Africa, at the very least, we have to commit to helping African countries keep their best.

One of the sectors in which Africa is struggling to keep its best is healthcare. Thousands of doctors are now leaving West Africa annually, just years after Ebola demonstrated the region's vulnerability. Still, healthcare is just one of the industries most affected by brain drain.

Do you feel like things have accelerated recently? The pandemic was pretty brutal for African economies, and Nigeria in particular is now facing its worst economic crisis in decades. Did you see anything change before and after the pandemic?

on a much broader African scale, you have this situation where with the pandemic, African countries, thankfully, were not as hit health-wise, but economically things got really tough for people. And then just as African countries were starting their emergence and trying to put the auras of COVID behind there, Russia's invasion of Ukraine led to higher food prices, higher energy prices. That's

Economies that were already shaky, basically where it's like with a second obstruction in less than two years. It's like all of these confluents of factors that made things just become terrible for people. Are there some countries in West Africa that are feeling the effects of this brain drain, you know, more than others? If you look at Nigeria, population 220 million, the GDP is between 67 and 77 percent of West Africa. It's bleeding people.

And it's filling it. When I went back home in December, I spoke to people at these little roundtables with my friends, and they were just complaining about the lack of expertise in critical areas. The Nigerian Medical Association said in one of its reports that there are hospital wards where there are no doctors, where there are no nurses. ♪

Despite Nigeria's population of 218 million, the country only has 24,000 licensed doctors. That means one medical doctor for every 5,000 people, compared to one for every 250 people in wealthy countries.

This has led Nigeria to consider a mandatory five-year service for doctors who are trained in the country as a solution to a worsening problem. No country can afford to lose medical personnel, at least not at the rate at which Nigerians, Sierra Leoneans, Senegalese are losing them. I told you the number for Nigerian doctors. Over the last five years or so, more than 70,000 Nigerian nurses have left. So you're talking about a situation in which

The countries that really cannot afford to emorragize expertise or talent

are the ones hemorrhaging them, which means that those countries become more and more vulnerable, right? So it's one thing that you have nurses and doctors who are complaining that they've not been paid and they want to be paid and they need their tools to be able to do their job. It's another thing when you enter a hospital and you need a critical surgery, you need diagnosis for a problem and all of that, and there is nobody to do that.

And that's exactly what's going on. And the problem is manifest in other West African countries. But the focus on Nigeria is important because it's the biggest player in the sub-region, and you can see the pattern in other parts of West Africa by looking at what's going on in Nigeria. So Nigeria, in an overarching way, is really representative of the problems the whole region is facing. It is, with regard to brain drain, yes.

Look, I mean, Nigerians are often accused of thinking the world revolves around us. It's kind of something that I think Americans are also accused of a few times. Yes.

I think you can see some of the patterns in that it's not just in Nigeria. I travel across the region for work and I talk to young people and I kind of hear the same frustration as well. People who are frustrated with the lack of economic opportunities. So it's just like the same patterns that you can see in Nigeria are basically emerging today.

The method in which people are living in the country might differ slightly. But I think overall, beneath it all, there's this immense frustration that people are feeling about the state of their countries, basically. One of the narratives in the 2010s was about this emerging middle class in Nigeria. But two recessions later, two currency devaluations later, the economy has kind of fallen off a cliff since 2015. And so you can basically just map

the time that things started getting worse for most people. And I think there was a poll in 2019 that showed that I think 40% of Nigerian adults that they interviewed expressed a desire to migrate and said they were thinking of doing it within the next five years. It's 2024 now, so it's five years now. And that was the highest number of any country that was surveyed in this poll.

According to a report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, more Africans today are willing to leave their home countries than ever before. And as we said, Africa is exceedingly young. The continent is projected to make up 42% of the world's youth population by the end of this decade.

I'm curious, how does it feel being around a group of people who are just so young? So it's a very interesting thing because you see that most people don't have, for example, the memories of some of the worst periods of this country. Like as recently as the 90s, Nigeria had a military dictator and there's people who have never experienced that before.

The country is currently going through economic turmoil right now, which, you know, it's terrible, but it's not the worst this country has ever experienced. But for loads of young people, this is as bad as it gets. And objectively, inflation at 30% is really bad. But there used to be 70-something percent inflation at some point in the 90s.

This feeling is so common that it has earned a popular name, Joppa.

japa a word that holds the power to ignite dreams of a new life when did you japa and why did you japa for a better life especially we're talking about a japa syndrome in our text image japa the yoruba word for run

So I want to ask you about a term that we've seen on social media to describe this phenomenon of people leaving Nigeria. What is Joppa? How did it come to represent the feelings of Nigeria's youth?

Okay, yeah. So, you know, Jack Bar means to literally flee something. And it was popularized by an Afro-Bits singer called Naira Mali. And, you know, it was sang in a song, People Shoot Jack Bar. And it was mentioned in like, Jack Bar, Jack Bar, Jack Bar to London. And then he mentioned like,

other places people could potentially go to. And, you know, it's just one of those things that just takes on a life of its own and you can't explain how it happened. And I think, you know, it kind of also meshed with the popular feeling in 2018, 2019 in Nigeria at the time of people thinking of basically how to leave Nigeria, you know? And so, Jakba, it's...

It's a Yoruba term, which is one of the main ethnic groups in Nigeria. But it's a transcended tribe or ethnic group. Everyone uses it. It's basically in verb now. You know, people say, I have Japa at the ED at the back.

It's a thing that's now part of the Nigerian lexicon. And now everyone knows about it, right? So it's one of those things that just takes on a life or we can talk about economic theories and political whatever. But, you know, just this four letter word just encapsulates the entirety of what we've been discussing this whole time. We'll be back after a quick break.

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And then I get to bring it to you. Together, we can figure out what next. While young professionals are beginning to leave West Africa, the region is coping with a surge in political upheaval, in which some of those left behind, who perhaps don't have the resources to leave, are throwing support behind populists and coup leadership. I think the interesting thing about Africa's youth dividend, quote-unquote,

People have always talked about this uncritically and saying it and mentioning the youth as an unalloyed good when people don't talk about the fact that it's only useful if you have jobs for these young people. I cover radicalization and stuff happening in the Sahel. This is this semi-arid streaming in the Sahara, south of the Sahara. And you have countries there like Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali

that have been affected by jihadist insurgencies for the best part of the last decade. And what happens the most is a lot of the people who join these groups are not necessarily motivated by ideology, right? And this is from me talking to security officials from those countries and from Western countries who work there. Most of the problem is because people don't have jobs and they're frustrated. They have grievances against their country.

And these groups, these insurgent groups, they're very clever. I remember talking to some French security official who told me like, look, if someone is unemployed, right, and you give them $50 a week and a Kalashnikov and a motorcycle, that's a very good deal for someone who is unemployed because the alternative is that they don't have anything to do. So it's like having masses of young people is only an advantage if there's work for them.

If you look back to some of the coups that took place over the last two, three years, Mali, Niger, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Chad, and all of that, one element that came out that puzzled a lot of people is young people welcoming the military appropriately.

preparing to welcome the military. And my interpretation of that has always been, it's not as if those young people want soldiers in power. What this message they are sending is that liberal democracy, as practiced in those countries, has not been working for them. And it's one of the reasons why young people in West Africa and in Africa in general are fleeing to more economically prosperous and democratically stable countries.

The United States is suspending security cooperation with military forces in Niger, a week after soldiers ousted the country's president and his government. Today, soldiers in Gabon seized power immediately after election results were announced. Another African leader toppled by the army. Whose turn will it be next? So since 2020, there have been nine successful coups in West and Central Africa.

And it seems like this complex situation, right? Young people are both repelled by what's going on, but left no options for success, contributing to a ruthless cycle of political turmoil. So can you speak more to this? How is the political situation in West Africa contributing to mass migration? I think following the coups d'etat that have taken place over the last three years,

I think more and more people have given up. And you have all these leaders in Africa who have been there forever. Yoweri Museveni, Paul Kagame, Nguema in the Kutura Guinea, Bia in Cameroon. So if you look at the military coup, one significant thing that happened was that young people came out not to protest the coups, but to express support for the coup plotters, to say, hey, please welcome.

And I'm sure even the soldiers must have been taken aback, like, you're not supposed to like us. We just took over power, right? We just overwrote your mandate. But that's not what happened. And I think that's giving a lot of young people anxiety about their future. It is something I think we all want to know about young people.

There is a sense in which youth culture globally is the same. We live in a world in which images, ideas, concepts, practices, discourses circulate ceaselessly. And young people consume all these things through TikTok and Facebook and Instagram. It's one thing, for instance, to be frustrated about what's going on in your country. It's another thing to have this sense that

Things could be better. And to be talking to all your friends in other parts of the world and to be observing things going on there and then to ultimately ask that question, why not here? Why not me? So in that sense, persistent political instability, political uncertainty, economic depression, all those things are leading young people to want to live, hence contributing to brain drain.

Do people blame countries like France and the UK, which obviously colonized Africa for decades, for current problems? This is the interesting part, right? In Nigeria, when people are talking about how things have gone wrong, people usually don't blame colonialism. You know, people save a lot of their energies for the elite class in Nigeria, for the ruling class in Nigeria. And then if you go to like

francophone-speaking countries, you know, Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, you know, they have a big grievance with France. I think some of it is probably how the UK and France differed in their attitude towards Africa post-independence. The UK kind of left most countries alone and retreated into its own shell. France had Francophrique, which was this system of Afrikaners

African elites basically working for French interests in exchange for like diplomatic cover and all of that stuff you know I think you're much more likely to find a Nigerian living in diaspora blame the UK for the country's wars than like a Nigerian living in Nigeria most Nigerians living in Nigeria reserve all of their anger for the ruling class in this country

Anti-French sentiment has sometimes bubbled over into support for a surprising partner, Russia. When we talk about why this matters to the United States, a lot of those young people celebrating coups were...

waving Russian flags? They were. They were also burning French flags. Okay. It's a case of two flags. It's worth talking about. So part of the critique of liberal democracy and frustration with the way it actually materializes is that it's not delivering economically for young people.

But there's a larger story which is also stoked by China, by Russia, by those countries that are engaged in geopolitical competition with the United States. And the story goes like this. Democracy is not for you in Africa. It's a ruse concocted by the United States and Western countries.

What you need is your own way of governing yourself. So hence Afro-democracy. The terms of that Afro-democracy are never really specified. And if you look at it very well, the people tend to promote it

are African leaders because it allows them to get away with murder, practically speaking. But Russia and China come in and they use that to say, the United States is not your friend. Western countries are not your friend. You know how I know that? They colonized you. Oh, by the way, they haven't let go. There's neocolonialism.

But I didn't colonize. We are your friend. Accept us. So that's what's going on there. That's why you say Russian flag. Russia becomes a metaphor for that entity that is not the West, for that entity that is not the United States. Russia and China are the countries that are the enemies of our perceived enemies, hence our friends.

Okay, that leads me to my next question, which is, where are people going? Are they going to Russia or China? Are they going to Western countries? So the UK has always attracted Nigerians. I think that continues to be the case. The US is also a destination for Nigerians, especially for people who want to do graduate studies, like PhDs. I know quite a few people who have moved to the States

for their PhDs because American schools actively try to recruit people to join PhD programs. So there's that, the English language also makes it very easy for people to move. So, you know, there's a big Nigerian community in the US as well.

As of 2017, that community measured 35,000 people. And the number of Nigerians living in the U.S. has grown even larger in recent years, as an increasing number of Nigerians choose to move abroad. Across the pond, the U.K. granted over 78,000 visas to emigrating Nigerians in 2023 alone. Unsurprisingly, young Nigerians have the most negative opinion in the whole continent about the direction their country is headed.

95% say things are going badly.

Canada has also been intentional about getting skilled migrants from across the world. I think what has kind of changed in the last maybe five years or thereabouts is we're seeing more and more people moving to European countries, say Germany or the Netherlands. And, you know, in talking to people, most people who go there are usually engineers working for tech companies. These are the cities that have like big tech companies in Europe.

So, you know, because of economic opportunities, people are being attracted to countries that are usually not on Nigeria and Israel. When you're reporting around West Africa, what is the sentiment among those who do decide to stay? Some people decide to stay because, you know, they have jobs.

good jobs and they like living here. I think another intangible is the thing about people being scattered all around the world is kind of lose the sense of community. Nigeria in particular has a big sense of community. Personally, my brother lives abroad, right?

And I have a niece and a nephew. I haven't seen them. I still live in Nige. They live in Canada. Ideally, most people would love to live back home. - Right. I mean, you bring up your brother. Personal questions, you. Why, you know, you grew up in Nigeria, moved abroad, right? - Yeah. - And now you're back. - Yeah.

Why? I mean, I think like the answer is just like, I love being a journalist. And so, you know, it's like when the opportunity to join the FT came, I just wasn't in a position to not move back. When I told my friends I was moving back to Nigeria, most people were like, why? Did many of your friends decide to leave Nigeria also? Yes. Almost everyone, either people I grew up with or people I met as an undergrad or whatever,

Ebenezer also grew up in Nigeria, but now he lives in the United States. I moved to the United States in 2006, became an American in 2015. I think where most people have a problem is with illegal migration.

In Europe, it's becoming a question of numbers. I think most people, again, work on migration. But you do have a corner of society in some of those societies, like in Sweden, in Finland, where people are beginning to have some reservations, to express some reservations about the number of immigrants coming in.

Other than that, I would say the United States, Canada and the West. I mean, think about Canada over the last five years or so. It's literally opened its borders to migrants from different parts of the world. Would you ever go back? What do you think? I do go back. I went to Nigeria in December, but I'm an American now. So I still have older parents in Nigeria. I was able to see them, you know, the last time I went. So my roots, obviously, are in Nigeria and Nigeria.

If you listen to my accent, you know that there's something incurably Nigerian about me. That's not going to go away, right? But I always say, don't listen to what people say. Watch what they do. What do young people in Africa do?

They vote with their feet. Where do they go? Everybody wants to come to the United States. Everybody wants to go to Canada. People want to go to the liberal democracies that are at the same time doing very well economically. People feel that in those countries that there are no arbitrary impediments standing in their way. And they look at the success that previous countries

generation of migrants to those countries have been able to achieve and they say, "I can do it." And I'm proud to count myself as one of those people.

What are some solutions? You know, solve the problem right now, Ebenezer. It's easy. I thought you were not going to get there. I'm ready to solve all the problems. Okay. The United States will always be a point of attraction for people around the world. And long may that be the case. Canada, Germany, all the European countries, the United Kingdom. So what you want to have, and this comes back to the question of political stability that we started with. You want people to,

to have a sense that when they are living in their country, that the country itself is worth investing in. One of the problems, and I speak here as a Nigerian, is the absolute lack of transparency in governance, which then reverberates to other sectors of the society. I mean, the population of West Africa is right around 400 million.

That's a lot of people. That's a big space. Potentially, that's a huge market for investment. That's a lot of young people who want to excel. There's a lot of energy there to be tapped into. So insofar as one is naturally deterred by pessimism, but I think there's also something to be said for looking at the big picture and saying, what if we get it right in West Africa?

What is it going to mean for the United States? What is it going to mean for the rest of the world? Well, that's the perfect bridge to my last question, which is going back to the episode, you know, we did in 2020. We called the future is African. So I thought I'd end with a provocative question. Is the future still African?

that will depend on Africans. What you always have in any society is potential. Mobilizing that potential, transforming it into actual security, welfare, prosperity for the people in question, it's always a question of human artifacts. The people of Africa have to do the heavy lifting.

Outsiders can help. The EU can help. The United States can help. I encourage them to help. I hope they do help. But at the end of the day, the fundamental questions about the future of Africa will have to be provided by Africans themselves. Is the future African? It can be, depending on how Africans respond.

Thank you guys so much for tuning into this season finale of Why It Matters. We'll be taking a break over the summer and producing new episodes. So keep an eye on your feed as we head into the fall.

For resources used in this episode and more information, visit cfr.org slash whyitmatters. And take a look at the show notes. If you ever have any questions or suggestions or just want to chat with us, email at whyitmatters at cfr.org. Or you can hit us up on X, better known as Twitter, at cfr underscore org.

Why It Matters is a production of the Council on Foreign Relations. The opinions expressed on the show are solely that of the guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. This episode was produced by Molly McEnany, Noah Berman, Asher Ross, and me, Gabrielle Sierra. Our sound designer is Marcus Zacharia. Production assistance for this episode was provided by Mariel Ferragamo and Kennedy Mangus.

Our interns this semester are Emily Hall-Smith and Ethan Wicks. Robert McMahon is our managing editor. Our theme music is composed by Carrie Torhusen. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your audio. For Why It Matters, this is Gabrielle Sierra signing off. See you in the fall.