For those of you like me who have not heard Shanta Devarajan on 'Mobilizing the African Diaspora', it is worth having the patience to sit through George Collinet's initial introduction. George starts with "Remittances again? You just had a podcast on remittances" (referring to Dilip's interview)!
Shanta talks about the impact of the crisis and also about the diaspora conference where he chaired a session on brain drain, and where Michael Clemens compared the remittances of Nigerian doctors to the cost of their education and found that the former exceeds the latter.
He discusses the next steps for migration within and out of African countries, which he says can and should not be stopped, and what the World Bank is doing in this area. Although there is "no clear battleplan", the World Bank is transferring knowledge across regions. For example, rather than trying to stop outward migration, Rwanda introduced "pay for performance" in the health sector, which has created incentives for doctors to stay and treat patients better.
For internal migration, the large increase in youth population in Africa is creating migration to urban areas. Shanta suggests some steps to address this:
- create non-farm employment
- create public services in urban areas, such as electricity, transport
- don't stop migration, but create jobs in urban areas and an urban manufacturing base
Enjoy the podcast!
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