SAE NEWS | 27 SEPTEMBER 2026
FROM BRAIN DRAIN TO BRAIN CIRCULATION
“A Proposed Policy Direction for Africa”
By – Fortune Madondo
AUTHOR BIO:
Fortune Madondo is a Zimbabwean Pan-Africanist, decolonial thinker and youth organiser. His work is unapologetic: pro-African sovereignty, anti-neocolonialism, pro-justice. He writes to challenge hegemony and champion African self-determination.
Introduction
Africa is bleeding its best.
Every year, Africa trains surgeons who operate in Europe, engineers who build America, professors who teach in Australia, and financiers who finance Asia and the Middle East. Africa calls it “brain drain”. On the margins of the 81st United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York, September 2026, President E.D. Mnangagwa of Zimbabwe offered a different language for this old wound, in order to heal the wound: “brain circulation”.
The Crisis
According to AUDA-NEPAD (New Partnership for Africa’s Development) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM), Africa loses 70,000 of its best brains every single year. Not per decade. Per year. Seventy thousand surgeons, engineers, professors and coders — trained by Africa, flown out of Africa.
The bill is brutal. The African Union estimates US$2 billion lost annually in human capital. The IOM says US$4 billion. Both are true. Africa loses the person and the productivity. Africa loses the doctor and the hospital that dies without her.
Africa spends over US$2 billion of poor people’s taxes training doctors it will never see again. The World Health Organization has priced our pain: replacing one African-trained doctor costs between US$21,000 and US$59,000. Africa cannot afford to replace them. So Africa does not. Africa simply bleeds.
The result is not a statistic. It is a corpse in a corridor in Kinshasa because there is no doctor. It is a class of one hundred and twenty (120) students taught by one lecturer in Nairobi and Harare. It is a continent whose most valuable resource is labelled “shortage” at home and “talent” abroad. This haemorrhage has a cure. If Africa cannot stop her children from leaving, she must stop their knowledge from leaving with them.
Policy Shift 1: From Loss to Strategic Asset
The African Union (AU) calls the diaspora the 6th Region in speeches, but treats it as an Automated Teller Machine (ATM) in practice. That must end. The diaspora must be codified not as donors, but as co-developers. Every National Development Plan must have a diaspora chapter with hard Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) — not for remittances received, but for technology transferred, patents co-owned and curricula co-designed.
Whether you are a surgeon, an engineer, a professor, or Information Communication Technology (ICT) specialist or a financier in the diaspora, one does not need to return permanently to make a lasting impact. Skills abroad remain a national asset. Policy must treat them as such.
Policy Shift 2: From Remittances to Knowledge
For years, Africa celebrated US$95 billion in annual remittances. Remittances feed families. They do not build systems.The evolution is clear: from remittances to strategic investment, from movement of people to movement of knowledge, technology and capital. This requires law, not slogans:
- An AU Brain Circulation Protocol
- A 90-day, tax-free, AU-issued e-visa that grants diaspora professionals automatic practice licenses at home. No re-registration. No bribe.
- Kill the Bureaucracy
- Diaspora Service Centres where a passport takes 48 hours, not 48 weeks, and where investment protection is guaranteed by law, not by a minister’s handshake.
- Ring-Fence the Future
- Direct diaspora capital and knowledge into agriculture value-addition, mining beneficiation, renewable energy, digital economy and infrastructure — not just real estate in affluent suburbs.
- Conclusion: The Choice
Africans in the diaspora do not have to return permanently to contribute to the continent. They need to channel skills, expertise, technology and capital back to Africa. Brain drain is not inevitable. It is a policy choice. Africa must now choose brain circulation — and put it in law, in budget, and in practice.
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Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the editorial position of Southern Africa Eye News.
