Dealing with brain drain

Surprising, and also worrying. For these figures seem to confirm a concern we had raised in a previous editorial — that the region in general, and Trinidad and Tobago in particular, was being debilitated by a brain drain. The success of Caribbean persons in Britain suggests that our brightest, most energetic, and most ambitious individuals are leaving their native islands to make the developed nations more developed.

A Newsday reader, Dionyse Fernandes, put the issue in a personal context. In a letter to the editor, she said that she had two children already studying overseas, having won scholarships, with her two younger children likely to join their siblings eventually. Ms Fernandes queried how Japan and Singapore were able to persuade their best and brightest to return home when those countries were trying to modernise, and called for national dialogue and action in pursuit of this.

The case of Japan cannot be applied to Trinidad and Tobago. Over its long history, Japan has evolved an extremely ordered society in which everyone knows their place, but where there is also upward mobility for those who have the talent and ambition. One result of this is that Japanese people are quite patriotic, with all the good and bad consequences this brings. So, when in the late 19th century, Japanese leaders realised that they needed Western technology and science in order to maintain their strength as a nation, they sent their young people to acquire this knowledge, confident that these persons would return to use their new expertise to advance Japan.

The case of Singapore is somewhat different, and does have some lessons for us. In the 1960s, the Singaporean leadership decided that the best strategy for development would be to invite multinationals to set up shop in the island-nation. The government invested heavily in education to ensure the multinationals would have a skilled workforce and also insisted that locals be trained by the firms. The government also specifically recruited graduates who had chosen to go overseas for their education, mainly because they felt that persons with a cosmopolitan outlook would be more efficient in the multinational companies. It is probably also significant that Singaporean senior managers often reach their positions by the time they are 40, as the result of a deliberate grooming process.

Contrast this with our system, where locals who return looking for niches here are often seen as upstarts and where those who stay can often only reach the top by criteria based on age rather than performance. Ours is a system almost designed to frustrate talent, innovation and ambition, and this is the core reason we have a brain drain. So what is to be done? The private sector can do its bit, and indeed has begun to do so by fast-tracking those young persons who show potential.

However, it is the responsibility of the government to take the larger initiative, by tracking scholarship winners and other successful individuals, and offering them incentives to return. But those incentives cannot be merely pecuniary, since the developed countries will always be able to outbid us. Many locals living overseas, however, would be willing to return even with a pay cut, if they think their talents and skills will be properly utilised, if they think their children will get a good education, and if they think their person and property will be reasonably secure. This cannot be done in a day, but if we can get our best and brightest to stay or to return, it will certainly make all these goals easier to achieve.