Policymakers in several African countries are on the wrong side of the medical professionals "brain drain" debate

The solution to high-skill emigration ought to be to expand and raise the standards of training medical professionals, not blanket bans on emigration

A number of African countries (see here, here, and here) have recently passed laws or promulgated policies designed to stem the emigration of scarce medical professionals. While the region’s acute shortage of healthcare professionals is a real concern, blanket emigration bans are likely to exacerbate the problem by shrinking the pipeline of future doctors and denying medical schools opportunities for improvement. In addition, countries that restrict emigration stand to miss out on remittances that, at least in the case of medical doctors, have been shown to more than pay for the typical cost of training.

I: African countries face a severe shortage of healthcare professionals

There is a significant shortage of doctors and other medication professionals in Africa. For example, according to the standard measure of physicians per 1000 people, the region (0.2) lags the world average (1.6). Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, stands at about a quarter the global average (0.4), while Ken…