Foreign ministers bid to stop Africa’s brain-drain

By David Cronin

Date: 30/03/06

EU development and foreign ministers are to commit themselves next month (10-11 April) to action to stem the 'brain drain' which is damaging staff levels in African hospitals.

Diplomats from Austria, the current holder of the EU's presidency, said that ministers would discuss a possible EU-wide code on "ethical recruitment". Its aim would be to ensure that European hospitals do not deprive their African counterparts of proper care by luring doctors away with offers of better pay and conditions.

According to the African Medical and Research Foundation in Nairobi, only 10% of physicians trained in Kenya's public hospitals each year remain in the country. Malawi, where HIV-infection rates among pregnant women are estimated at 15-20%, has only two doctors to every 100,000 inhabitants.

A report prepared by French Socialist MEP Marie-Arlette Carlotti for the European Parliament's development committee says that for many poor countries "migration is synonymous with the departure of their best trained or most enterprising citizens", particularly of doctors and nurses. While the Parliament has recommended for several years that 20% of the EU's development aid funds should be reserved for education and healthcare, less than 5% of money spent under the European Development Fund in 2004 went to those sectors.

Carlotti's report warns that EU development aid earmarked for migration-related projects should not be used to deal with security issues.

A EUR 25 million EU-funded 'migration facility' for the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) bloc is to come onstream by the end of this year.

Officially its aim is to help ACP countries manage migration, particularly migrants moving from one African country to another.

But the report calls for clarification of the aims of the facility, which funds regional and cross-border programmes, so that it is not used solely to address security issues.

Carlotti complains that the EU's Aeneas programme on aid to third countries in the field of migration and asylum is "very widely used for border protection purposes".

Because it is funded from a category of the Union's budget dealing with foreign policy, rather than the EU's internal security, Carlotti said that it should be "used genuinely and exclusively as part of a strategy to enhance the contribution made to development by migration".

The European Commission has said, however, that one of the programme's objectives is to prevent unauthorised migration. Aeneas has been allocated EUR 45m for 2006.

EU governments and the Commission have been studying recently how Mauritania can be helped to deal with migration between its northern coast and the Spanish territory of the Canary Islands. Around 1,000 sub-Saharan Africans arrive in the Mauritanian port of Nouadhibou each month, wanting to be smuggled into Europe, often in unsafe fishing vessels. Migration from Mauritania has increased since Morocco, previously one of the main transit points for Africans hoping to enter Europe, tightened its border controls late last year.

A Commission official said: "We are not considering using development funds to deal with the security aspects of the Mauritanian case."

A Mauritanian diplomat said there were a "lot of things we have to deal with", including border controls, the provisions of camps for migrants and sending back migrants expelled from Europe to their home countries.

Article previews the General Affairs and External Relations Council meting on 10-11 April 2006. One item to be discussed was action to stem the 'brain drain' which was damaging staff levels in African hospitals. Article also takes a more general look at the EU's activities concerning migration and development.