Why Young Africans Leave

There is a word for it in Ghana. Jakpa. It means leaving for good, packing a life into a visa file and not really planning the return trip. Other countries have their own version of the same word, different sound, same exact meaning. The pattern it describes is continental, not local.

The scale of it is larger than most outside conversations about Africa account for. By 2010, thirty eight percent of college educated Africans were living abroad.¹ Ghana alone lost sixty percent of its locally trained doctors.² The medical sector has consistently been hit hardest of any profession, which tells you something about who can most easily get a visa and who is most needed at home, two facts pulling in opposite directions at once.

I think the push and pull get confused in a lot of commentary, so it is worth separating them.

The push factors are mostly about reliability. Power that goes out for hours most days. Institutions, hospitals, courts, regulatory bodies, that work, but slowly and inconsistently enough that planning a life around them feels like a gamble. Salaries that do not track the actual cost of living closely enough to plan a future on. None of this is exaggerated for effect. It is the daily experience that makes the decision to leave feel less like ambition and more like basic risk management.

The pull factors are about where that same skill set gets rewarded with more certainty. A doctor trained in Accra or Lagos is the same doctor in London or Toronto, just paid more reliably, working with more consistent infrastructure, and generally treated as fully qualified rather than as a credential that needs re-proving. The pull is not about loving the new country more. It is mostly about the math working out more predictably there.

What I find more interesting than the leaving itself is a pattern I have watched up close among people my age. Many describe, often in real detail, exactly how they intend to help develop the country they are leaving, once they have left it. Remote consulting. Diaspora investment. Coming back for a few months a year to run a project. The help is almost always conditional on the departure happening first. I do not think this is dishonesty. I think it reflects a real belief that influence and resources are easier to accumulate elsewhere, and can then be exported back home more efficiently than they could have been built up while staying.

I am not in a position to tell anyone that belief is wrong. Sometimes it is correct. Diaspora remittances are a larger and more reliable source of capital for many African economies than foreign aid, year after year. People who left often do send real help back, not just promises.

What I think is missing from a lot of the brain drain conversation is the assumption built into the word itself, that this is purely loss, a drain, something only subtracted from one side of the ledger. The picture is more mixed than that. The same migration that empties a hospital ward in Accra also builds a remittance pipeline, a diaspora network, a set of contacts and capital that did not exist before. Whether that trade is worth it, for the country and for the individual making the choice, is not a question with one answer. It depends entirely on what gets done with what is gained on both sides of the departure.