British universities could help minimise the “brain drain” of skilled workers from poorer countries in Africa, says a new report commissioned by United Kingdom academics.
The Brain Drain: Academic and Skilled Migration to the United Kingdom and its Impacts on Africa says universities could transfer resources, technology and knowledge to developing nations through exchanges of staff and students, research collaborations and “twinning” with institutions.
The report, by Alex Nunn of the Policy Research Institute at Leeds Metropolitan University, acknowledges that developing countries in Africa see some benefits from the brain drain because migrant workers send money home and might also transfer knowledge back to their countries of origin.
But these benefits are dwarfed by the effects of losing so many teachers, scientists, engineers and health workers. The brain drain “marks a potentially serious barrier to economic growth, development and poverty reduction”, says the report. It argues that if skilled labour in general is important, academics are “doubly so” because of the role they play in research and innovation, as well as teaching and training to build the skills of others.
It adds that although “numbers of staff working in UK higher education from developing countries are relatively small and insignificant in the context of the UK labour market, the effect of their loss to developing countries might be much more substantial because of the scarcity of skilled labour there”.
The report suggests compensating poor countries for the loss of skilled workers. It also suggests developing international recruitment protocols similar to those that the British National Health Service uses when recruiting health-care workers from the developing world.
The report was commissioned by the 67Â 000-member National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE) and the 48Â 000-member AUT, two unions representing UK-based lecturers.
The unions will use a conference next year to debate the issues and begin to develop a policy to help developing countries cope better with the brain drain.
Africa is not alone in battling with these issues. SciDev.Net correspondent Zoraida Portillo reported earlier this month that more than 20Â 000 professors at Peruvian state universities are to get their first pay rise for 22 years. China’s reverse brain-drain plan “risks backfiring” and Beijing-based science journalist Jia Hepeng says that plans by China, the second-largest economy in the world, to attract “overseas Chinese” researchers to help drive its scientific progress are being undermined by the “irresponsibility” of those being hired.
For 20 years, Shing-tung Yau, a Chinese-born mathematics professor based at the prestigious Harvard University in the United States, has helped China organise international scientific exchanges and attract foreign researchers of Chinese origin to teach and do research in China.
According to a report in the Beijing-based newspaper Science Times, Yau said many of the foreign researchers fail to do full-time research as required by their contracts, yet are paid several times more than their local counterparts.
“Some of them use their teaching time to travel across China attending academic meetings, while others just repeat research they have already published overseas,” said Yau. He said this has not only wasted precious research funds, but has also affected the careers of younger local scientists who might otherwise fill the posts taken by the overseas professors.
In recent years, several institutions — including the ministries of education and science, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and leading universities — have introduced programmes to attract leading foreign researchers — mainly overseas Chinese — to work in China for several months a year with attractive salaries, and tens of thousands of dollars of research funding.
In April, the National Natural Science Foundation of China began offering annual grants of one million yuan ($120Â 000) for up to four years to overseas Chinese researchers with foreign citizenship. Despite criticism by Yau and others, Ji Fusheng, a senior science policy researcher affiliated to the ministry of science and technology, says that these programmes should not be blamed as they have played an active role in helping China attract hundreds of internationally renowned researchers.
A major problem, says Ji Fusheng, a regional adviser to SciDev.Net, is that many Chinese universities and research institutes only want to use their relationship with these leading overseas scholars to increase the institution’s reputation and gain more research funding. They do not care whether the leading foreign researchers can do truly important research, Ji says.
He says employers should design better contracts for visiting scholars, and that the peer-review system for research they produce be more stringent to ensure the work is original. — SciDev.Net
Alex Nunn’s report is available on the Science and Development Network website