Biomedical Research in Developing Countries - UNICRI

that afflicts these countries. Mills and coll. 52 argue that the active recruitment of
health workers from sub-Saharan countries should be considered as a crime under
international law, due not only to its magnitude, but also to its being a widespread
phenomenon that is causing social alarm, contributing to the dilapidation of
essential health care infrastructure and provoking a future dire public health crisis.
While supporting the health care workers rights to expatriate in order to find a
better chance for career development and better life conditions, high income
countries should try to compensate low income countries for the loss of their
professional manpower.
Currently, more than 35% of the total official development assistance from
developed countries to Africa is spent on expatriate professionals. Due to that, recent
international law and instruments call for active recruitment of health workers to
stop 53 and set the minimum standard for compensation of loss in the form of
contribution to the betterment of the health structure of the delivering country.
Governments affected by the loss of health personnel also have a primary
responsibility to address the reasons for migration and to use incentives to retain
their professional workforce, through the improvement of local conditions. High
income countries on their side could contribute with repatriation grants, building
and staffing of clinics and health delivery infrastructures and training initiatives.
African governments have recently taken a common position on this phenomenon,
by considering the African Diaspora part of their development efforts 54 . The New
Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) calls for the establishment of a
reliable, continental database to determine the magnitude of the problem of brain
drain and to create the necessary conditions to curb it. Among the latest initiatives,
the United Nations backed project “Reversing Brain Drain into Brain Gain for Africa”
consists of the installation of the first computing grid at Cheikh Anta Diop
University in Dakar as part of a joint initiative by the UN Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Hewlett-Packard and the Grid Computing
Institute of France’s National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). This will be the
first sub-Saharan African component of the grid infrastructure created in 2004 by
the European Union that joins colleges in five African countries.
Other initiatives regard the strengthening of the presence of African research
reporting in the international publishing arena. Currently, at the level of scientific
research reporting, the total contribution of the developing countries to the world’s
scientific publication is 22%, of which 1.4% is represented by countries in Africa,
52 Mills E.J., Schabas W.A., Volmink J. et al., Should active recruitment of health workers from sub-Saharan Africa
be viewed as a crime?, The Lancet, 2008, Vol. 371, No. 9613, Pages 685-688
53 WMA Ethical guidelines for the international recruitment of physicians, the WHO task force against the brain
drain, the Commonwealth Code of practice for the international recruitment of health workers.
54 In July 2001, the Organization for African Unity – the former African Union (AU) - adopted a resolution
urging its Member States “to develop strategies for utilizing the scientific and technological know-how and skills
of the African Diaspora for the development of the continent.” and to consider the African Diaspora as the sixth
region of Africa, after North, South, East, West and Central Africa.
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