Inducing a brain gain

The emigration rate of the highly educated from Pakistan is currently 9.8 per cent, about triple the rate for Asia (3.6 per cent) and the world (3.7 per cent). The proposal here is to share the burden by having it fall on high-income country governments, international organisations and employees, and only partly the highly educated expatriate community. The burden spread thus on different agents may be more acceptable politically.

The UNDP Transfer of Knowledge Through Expatriate Nationals (Tokten) programme is designed to transfer knowledge through expatriate nationals.  This could be scaled up via a collaboration of aid agencies in high-income countries and relevant ministries in source countries. The review of Tokten suggests it has a few weaknesses although the concept is superb. First, it is under-resourced. Second, because of the lack of resources, it is disproportionately drawing on a young community of expatriates (89 per cent between 25 and 35 years). Third, it is not administratively strong so that there is a potential for collusion between government departments and expatriates.

The resource gap could be allayed if bilateral aid agencies channel part of their existing aid via a brain-gain scheme. For example, the US could have an alternative to the Fulbright-Hays programme that draws on the talent of the non-academic community. The programme could be run by bilateral aid agencies like the USAID and DFID (Department of International Development, UK) in collaboration with the UN and low-income country partners (governments, civil society, businesses) for needs identification.

One major grouse of low-income countries is that much of the aid flows back via the gravy train to international consultants.  Aid agencies argue that this is inevitable due to the lack of capacity in the low income countries. While the point can be argued, tapping the expatriate community would be cheaper and more effective. Cheaper, because of the element of volunteerism; more effective because given linguistic and cultural advantages, they would be quicker coming up to speed in their country of origin.

Costs could be further defrayed if employers provide short-term leave or kick in incentives for employees to use their leaves for voluntary service. The potential benefits for corporations could be establishing marketing contacts and happier and more productive workers. The aid agencies would need to provide air-tickets and health insurance. The ministries of overseas workers in the source countries could provide feedback on submitted expatriate proposals based on local knowledge of needs. Though a timed interactive process that is now possible electronically, a final task for a specified period could be worked out. The source country ministry would also be required to trouble shoot and facilitate productive stays and perhaps provide short-term accommodation at reasonable rates if needed.

Growth diagnostics has become popular in development economics.  The idea is to identify the binding constraint for the country in question and have policy address that constraint. These are useful exercises, but for anyone who has lived in a low-income country for an extended period of time, the most binding constraints always appears to be the lack of highly educated human capacity across the board.  International organisations like the World Bank and the UNDP contribute to this problem because while they write and talk about local capacity building, they systematically raid capacity of local organisations and governments with their higher salary scales.  The irony is that they subsequently de-skill this capacity by using highly trained personal in routine and mundane tasks.  This proposal may go some way in redressing the problem of low capacity in low-income countries.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 29^th, 2010.