ZIMBABWE: Brain drain initiative draws academics

An initiative to fight the brain drain from Zimbabwe is beginning to pay off, with 31 university lecturers having returned to the African country ravaged by a skills flight to teach in health faculties at higher education institutions and in hospitals on a short-term basis.

The sequenced short-term return programme, championed by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), was launched last year and brings professionals in the diaspora back to Zimbabwe. Afterwards they have the option to return to their new countries or remain in Zimbabwe permanently.

The initiative has so far seen 24 health professionals return to lecture in the college of health sciences at the country's oldest and biggest institution, the University of Zimbabwe.

Four lecturers have returned to the school of medicine at the National University of Science and Technology, and three are based at the Zimbabwe Association of Church-Related Hospitals Training School.

In a statement, the IOM said service delivery in the Zimbabwean health sector had been compromised in recent years by the migration of health professionals to South Africa, the United Kingdom, Australia, Botswana, Canada and other countries. This prompted the organisation to launch the short-term programme to lure back high-level healthcare skills.

Many professionals fled President Robert Mugabe's appalling human rights clamp-down and economic collapse, which fuelled run-away inflation that at one stage reached 231 million percent, wiping out incomes and savings.

In the latest failed states index, complied by the international research and educational organisation the Fund for Peace, Zimbabwe is ranked fourth worst in the world after Somalia, Chad and Sudan. The rating uses indicators such as arbitrary application of the rule of law and brain drain.

It said one in every five Zimbabweans had fled the country in the past decade, many of them professors, doctors, engineers, lawyers and journalists.

Early this year, a parliamentary education committee report revealed that the University of Zimbabwe's departments of animal science, community medicine, metallurgy and clinical pharmacology required a total of 62 more lecturers. The departments of computer science, veterinary sciences, psychiatry, geo-informatics and mining engineering had only one lecturer each but required a total of 60.

A modicum of normalcy is slowly returning to the country after Mugabe and long time rival Morgan Tsvangirai, now Prime Minister and leader of the Movement for Democratic Change, entered into a power-sharing agreement more than a year ago and abandoned the use of the Zimbabwe dollar, settling for foreign denominations and wiping out inflation.

The IOM said that returning health professionals could be placed temporarily in select hospitals around Zimbabwe, or at the University of Zimbabwe's college of health science (UZ-CHS) to conduct joint medical procedures with local personnel, lecture or contribute in other ways to the health sector.

"The aim is to contribute towards the improvement of health services in Zimbabwe and the training of health personnel at the UZ-CHS. The initiative is focused on supporting health care delivery through harnessing the positive aspects of migration."

But another recent development has dealt a blow to efforts to stem the brain drain.

Two weeks ago the government revealed that another programme, Health Strengthening Systems - bankrolled by the global fund to fight HIV, tuberculosis and malaria for the past four years and aimed at selected health professionals - expired on 31 July.

It ensured that professionals such doctors, nurses and laboratory technicians earned more than US$1,000 per month. But now they will revert to government salaries of between US$190 and US$250 per month.