After leaving the European Union, the UK is struggling to find nurses and teachers and is invading other nations, including its former colony Zimbabwe, to find these essential public sector professionals.
This is inhumane. It seems impossible to stop. However, it also illustrates a vicious cycle in which skilled workers go to the very same donor countries, undermining foreign aid meant to support countries like Zimbabwe in improving their health and education systems.
Since February 2021, more than 4,000 nurses and medical professionals have left Zimbabwe. The UK is by far the preferred location; according to data from the British Home Office from 2022, Zimbabwe is now among the top five countries for skilled worker visa recipients.
It’s a major drain, this. The Zimbabwe Medical Association estimates that there are just 3,500 doctors in the nation, which has a population of 15 million.
The World Bank reports that there are just 2.6 nurses per 1,000 inhabitants, which is an insufficient availability of nurses. Managers of a significant 1,000-bed public hospital informed reporters that when scores of nurses and physicians left for the UK in 2021, services were severely hampered.
Of course, the UK must put its own interests first, just like every other nation. However, the disparity between Zimbabwe’s $28 billion economy and the UK’s $3.2 trillion economy makes the competition for medical professionals unfair.
Consider this: 8.5 nurses are employed for every 1,000 people in the UK, more than three times the ratio in Zimbabwe, despite the NHS’s problems. Additionally, it is inexpensive to steal talent from a nation like Zimbabwe. Each doctor in the UK receives training at a cost of £230,000 ($281,000), much of which is offset by the importation of qualified medical personnel.
Simply put, the British government is stealing physicians and nurses from former colonies like Zimbabwe at a time when healthcare workers are fleeing the NHS in droves due to bad pay and conditions.
Raid on a classroom
As if that weren’t concerning enough, the UK is currently courting Zimbabwean teachers as well. From February 2023, educators in Zimbabwe will be able to apply for Qualified Teacher Status (QTS), which would allow them to work as teachers in the UK on a long-term basis.
The only other African countries on the list are Nigeria, Ghana, and South Africa. Many of the 135,000 public school teachers in the nation, according to teacher organizations, may be lured to accept positions in the UK. Zimbabwe has had one of Africa’s most remarkable post-colonial educational records over the past forty years, with the World Economic Forum placing it fourth best on the continent in 2016.
However, blaming the UK is pointless given that Zimbabwe is largely to fault for the situation it is currently facing. One of the main factors driving doctors, nurses, and teachers to look for better lands is the nation’s failure to pay them living wages.
A quarterly poll conducted in April 2022 by the state-run Zimbabwe Statistics Agency revealed that the majority of the nation’s workers were making the equivalent of $120 per month. Wages are well behind the rapidly rising inflation.
Zimbabwe’s government has asked the UK for “compensation” for enticing away its healthcare professionals. Each doctor in Zimbabwe apparently receives a $70,000 education. However, if the government had always paid its medical professionals, educators, and nurses more, they wouldn’t have been as tempted to leave the country.
The underfunding of hospitals and schools, as well as expensive corruption and leakages documented by Zimbabwe’s auditor general, are the causes of the shortage of essential instruments that medical professionals and teachers complain about in addition to their poor incomes.
A two-way street
It still creates an amusing dynamic that talented individuals are leaving a poor country like Zimbabwe for the UK. The Global Fund, an organization dedicated to treating HIV, TB, and malaria, praised the UK last November for providing a £1 billion ($1.23 billion) tranche of funding to the effort. From 2021 to 2025, the UK has set aside £35 million ($45 million) in help for “a robust health system in Zimbabwe.”
However, how can a weak nation be made resilient by lavishing aid funds on its healthcare system while plundering its most priceless resources – nurses, paramedics, social workers, and doctors? Peers in the House of Lords of the UK referred to this practise as “immoral and wicked” in June of last year.
It’s true that in its interactions with African countries, the UK has never placed a high importance on morality. The way Zimbabwe’s governments treat their teachers, healthcare workers, and residents in general is also mostly wrong.
However, the effects of Zimbabwe’s brain drain are obvious: A sick system is getting even sicker.
