The Scale of Africa's Skilled-Worker Migration to the Developed World

Africa sends a larger share of its university-educated population abroad than almost any other region on Earth, a pattern researchers have tracked for decades under the label brain drain. Around the year 2000, roughly one in three African migrants living in developed countries held a tertiary degree, a higher share than migrants from Latin America and the Caribbean or from Europe, according to the influential dataset economists Frederic Docquier and Abdeslam Marfouk built for the World Bank to measure skilled migration worldwide. Their research found that the proportion of highly educated people among African emigrants had risen by roughly seven percentage points over the preceding decade alone, even as African governments were investing heavily in expanding higher education at home.

The toll on individual countries varies enormously but runs deep in the hardest-hit cases. Small island and low-population states have been especially exposed: Cape Verde has lost an estimated 68 percent of its tertiary-educated labor force to emigration, with Gambia at 63 percent, Seychelles at 56 percent, Mauritius at 56 percent, Sierra Leone at 53 percent and Ghana at 47 percent, figures compiled from Docquier and Marfouk’s data showing that in several African nations, a majority of citizens who complete a university degree eventually leave the country. Healthcare has been one of the most closely studied sectors: roughly 65,000 African-trained physicians and roughly 70,000 nurses, a combined total of about 135,000 health professionals, currently practice in OECD member countries rather than in the health systems that trained them, a loss researchers link directly to persistent shortages of medical staff across much of the continent.

The pull factors behind that outflow are straightforward, higher salaries, better research infrastructure and, in some fields, opportunities that simply don’t exist at scale in smaller domestic economies, but the consequences for sending countries are contested among economists. Some research emphasizes the pure loss involved: governments that subsidize higher education effectively transfer that public investment to wealthier receiving countries when graduates emigrate, and losing a critical mass of specialists, doctors and researchers among them, can weaken institutions that depend on a stable, experienced workforce. Other scholars point to counterbalancing effects, including remittances sent home by skilled emigrants, professional networks that link diaspora expertise back to the continent, and the possibility that the prospect of emigration itself pushes more people to pursue higher education than would otherwise, a dynamic researchers call brain gain that can partly offset the loss even in countries with high emigration rates.

By the mid-2010s, the outflow had scaled up further still: OECD data recorded roughly 12.5 million African-born immigrants living in its member countries by 2016, with about 30 percent holding a completed higher education, a continuing pattern of skilled migration that researchers widely agree shows no sign of reversing on its own, tied as it is to wage and opportunity gaps between African economies and the wealthier countries that continue to draw their most educated citizens away.