Increase out-migration of the highly-skilled from Africa: The Ghanaian Case

There is overwhelming evidence that brain drain of professionals from the African continent has accelerated in the last decade beheading the capacity of African countries to deliver on health care, education, welfare and other important facets of life. According to 2001 estimates, 23 000 graduates migrated from Africa each year into the Developed Economies. The numbers should even be higher with the current migration trends. Although some observers, institutions and governments have acknowledged huge increases in the level of remittance from abroad as a corollary, the departure of the best brains and the most talented is doing irreparable damages to socio-economic processes on the continent. There are umpteenth media reports and extensive researches pointing to the closure of educational facilities, health facilities and other social services as a result of the brain drain.

For a country like Ghana, there is substantial evidence to suggest that the exodus of the highly-skilled is having negative impacts on the quality of rural life in its entirety than observable in the urban communities. Underlying this inequalities are disparities in the delivery of quality education, health and other important social services. Copious historical and contemporary literature bespeak of these disparities, plummeting the rural communities into a vicious-cycle of chronic shortages in essential human capital needed for health, education and other social deliveries. Therefore as the gap between the so-called global North-South divide in terms of human capital availability widens, its parallel disparities in the availability of urban-rural human capital is compelling. In the corollary scenario in a country like Ghana, upward social mobility for those at the lower strata of the economic rung, particularly the rural poor and the Northern sector of the country-the three Northern Regions-becomes an improbable possibility, as a set of rural conditions entrench them in their situation from climbing the socio-economic ladder.

Over the last half century, Ghana has expended between 28% and 40% of her recurrent national budgetary allocation on education (the educational sector is the single recipient of the largest annual budgetary allocation). This has, in recent years, been augmented by 2.5% deduction out of the prevailing rate of the Value Added Tax to be paid by the Value Added Tax Service into a fund, dubbed The Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETfund), established by an Act of Parliament (GETfund Act, 2001 Act 581). By these significant allocations, education in Ghana is funded from the basic schools through to the tertiary level, but with a fee paying component at the tertiary level which is referred to as cost-sharing, whereby the beneficiary of education at the tertiary level square up for part of the cost of his/her education.

The inferences are that both the rich and the poor contribute to the funding of education in Ghana in similar ways. Indeed, the de rigueur contribution of both the rich and the poor, through the various forms of tax-direct and indirect-cumulatively make funding consistently available to the educational sector in Ghana from which every educated Ghanaian has benefited over the years and continues to benefit even in the face of cost-sharing in education at the tertiary level. It is by reason of this that the corporate investment in the socio-human capital is jeopardized and skewed to the advantage of the urban communities and the affluent, when the highly-skilled Ghanaian migrates. Evidently, it unleashes, in a concatenation of backlashes in its aftermath, unequal access to quality education, inequalities in health delivery to the disadvantage of the rural poor and crutches up the urban populations and the affluent against the poor especially those in the rural communities.

For the millions of the underprivileged and the rural poor in Ghana, higher education is certainly a clear-cut route out of poverty and deprivation. Rightly so, education and particular professional programmes are seen as reliable tools for entering the job market and certainly a means to socio economic empowerment which conveys status and pride. In the light of this, upward social mobility may come with one’s level of educational and professional achievements as the case usually is. This makes tertiary education and particular programmes, for example, medicine and it allied programmes, law and some engineering programmes, exceptionally popular among prospective students and their families.

But the stark reality for the rural poor and those in the three Northern Regions is the limitations imposed on them by their socio-economic conditions coupled with the disparities in the quality of urban-rural cum Southern-Northern educational systems to the advantage of the urban-southern communities and the affluent. Invariably, majority of the rural poor are unable to make it to the tertiary level of education let alone being selective in what programmes to enrol on.

This assertion was highlighted by the former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ghana, Professor Ivan Addae-Mensah, in a TV discussion (TV 3, Ghana. August 2002). He pointed out how particular well-endowed or well-resourced second cycle schools in the cities are dominating admissions to Ghana’s medical schools, the law schools and other so-called top-notch programmes in Ghanaian universities. A development he described, then, as quite alarming.

Incontrovertibly, there are functionally correlated semblances of this development within the lower stratums of the Ghanaian educational system with the higher level replicating what is ubiquitous at the substrata (basic level of education) in succession. Though there may be exceptions, the long established trend is that it is generally easier for students from top private schools to gain admissions to the top secondary schools across the country than students from poorly resourced mushroom public schools in the rural areas and the Northern Regions. The same thing could be said of admissions to the tertiary institutions and to particular programmes.

The raison d'être for the disparities in access to education between the rural poor and the underprivileged and the urban populations and the affluent are identifiable in myriad of segments. The so-called North-south divide, rural-urban divide are identifiable. At one level, while rural communities in Ghana do not have access to privately-run educational institution from the lower levels of the academic ladder to the tertiary levels, these entities/amenities are readily available in urban communities, proffering alternative conduits for quality education to most urban communities. Therefore, total dependence on state-run schools considered inferior in most cases is categorical without alternatives available in the rural and the Northern regions.

At another level, due to the persistent refusal of teachers to accept postings to the rural areas as a result of lack of availability of social amenities, it is not uncommon to come across schools in the rural areas of the country where one teacher mans two or more classes (1 teacher teaching 120 pupils in a class) concurrently. The overall effect is that, while in some cases, some basics schools are overstaffed in the urban centres and with well-trained teachers, rural schools are understaffed and in most cases with untrained teachers. This trend is also noticeable across the so-called northern-southern divide of the country with the most deprived areas being the three northern regions of Ghana-Northern, Upper East and the Upper West Regions.

There is considerable evidence that the situation is rather getting worse with the rapid increase in out-migration of the highly-skilled. Ghanaian graduates and other highly trained professionals trained at the tax payers’ expense who, hitherto, braved the odds by filling these vacancies, but now disillusioned by poor economic prospects at home, have discovered new routes to a phantasmal new life. They are leaving in their droves to join the bandwagon of the exodus.

Similar trends are already existent in the health sector and other areas of the Ghanaian economy, where hard sciences are required to fill ever widening vacancies. In the health sector, for instance, in the year 2001, the Ashanti Region in the middle belt of Ghana recorded 1 doctor to a population of 9 161 (1: 9 161). The first half of last year was 1 doctor to a population of 25 891 (1: 25 891). Currently, the doctor population ratio stands at 1 doctor to 41 267 (1: 41 267). The trend was no different for nurses with 1 nurse to a population of 3 086 (1: 3 086) in 2001 against 1 nurse to a population of 33 451 for 2006 (Ghana Health Services Record).

Though up-to-date national data on the human resource situation for the health sector were not readily available at the time of writing, 2001 statistics strongly attest to the disparities. For instance in 2001, when the Northern, Upper West and the Upper East Regions recorded 1: 51, 943, 1: 29 607 and 1: 29 529 respectively, the Greater Accra and the Ashanti Regions-South and Middle Belt regions-recorded 1: 3 079 and 1: 9 161. The inference is that with Ashanti Region currently grappling with 1: 41 267, it should be worse for the three northern regions and the rural communities across the country.

Some sections of the Tema Oil Refinery (the only oil refinery in Ghana had to close down some vital divisions of its department, which concomitantly affected the output of petroleum products on the Ghanaian market due to the poaching of its vital personnel by a refinery in the Persian Gulf. To a very large extent, this also illustrates how other areas of the economy are also struggling to cope with the departure of their vital staff.

The question therefore is: what job prospects are there in the countries of immigration for these highly-skilled individuals? For the Social Sciences and humanities trained graduates, it is not unusual these days to come across a Ghanaian and other Africans with two master’s degrees or a PhD working as security operatives, factory operatives, cleaners or a carers or in similar menial job of a kind. For doctors, nurses, engineers and professionals in other areas of the physical sciences, the job market may be a bit favourable, as the job market is constantly inundated with request for experts. Demand for professionals in these areas has always outstripped supply. However, one’s area of specialization, level of training and most of all your country of training may coalesce to determine your success at recruitments; with the African trained in the countries of immigration highly favoured over the home grown professionals from the continent. But generally most of them end up in the ‘care homes’.

The watershed is that whereas most countries of immigration-North American and European destinations-already have more than enough doctors, nurses, engineers, teachers, accountants and a host of other professionals, professionals on the continent abnegate duty, especially in fields where their expertise are most needed, to join the bandwagon of the exodus; with the ease on travelling restrictions for the highly-skilled. This should be seen in the light of the new mode of poaching nicknamed by some observers as cherry-picking or target poaching from the developing world.

A catalogue of human resource related reports on Ghana in recent times indicate a desperate situation which requires desperate measures. Untrained teachers, mostly unemployed youth who were unsuccessful at their university admission exams and could not berth a place in the various universities and other tertiary institutions are being mobilized to hold the fort vis-à-vis attempts to engage other retired teachers to fill the colossal shortfalls. It is estimated that Ghana needs over 10,000 teachers to fill vacancies in basics schools in her rural communities alone.

For her health sector, with important dynamics such as brain drain at bay and population at constant, projections are that it will take Ghana not less than 20 years to achieve the recommended doctor-population ratio of 1: 5 000 (WHO), based on 2005 national figures of 1: 20,000 with accretion rate of 150 doctors per year from her 3 medical schools. Other areas of the economy--- engineering, higher education and social service areas--- are not left out of these phenomena.

On the one hand, remittance from migrants abroad and the anticipated brain gain from the probable return of migrants in future are making the headlines. While on the other hand, chronic understaffing and its chain effects on sustainable development, ‘brain waste’ in countries of immigration and cumbersome integration processes cannot be underestimated.

The summation is that for any single highly-skilled African and, for that matter, a Ghanaian in employment on the continent who abnegates duty and join the bandwagon of the exodus, displacement of knowledge and technical expertise follow as a result, especially when they end up in performing menial task not even the uneducated and unskilled in their host countries will perform.