The Forgotten Migration

When people talk about migration between poor and rich countries in modern political discourse, they usually mean the pattern most commonly observed today: relatively talented people from the developing world leaving for the developed world. Common examples include brain drain, remittances, the loss of doctors and engineers, the educated African or Indian or Caribbean professional who ends up in London, Toronto, or New York. That usual discussion is familiar enough to most people. The more neglected question, however, runs in the opposite direction. What happens when the developing world stops importing the people who know how to build and run modern institutions?

Just to iterate preemptively, this post is not a romantic defense of expatriate rule, nor an argument that foreign experts should permanently govern poor countries. No country aspires to be dependent. At the same time, every successful developing country has had to learn from somewhere, from countries that already had the knowledge they were lacking. Therefore, the more interesting and important question is whether foreign knowledge should be treated as a tool to be mastered or as a contamination to be expelled.

Japan is the most obvious example of a country that understood this point. In the late nineteenth century, Japan did not modernize by merely buying Western machines and hoping progress would follow. Instead, it sent its own officials and students abroad to study in Western universities, armies, factories, bureaucracies, and technical schools. The Japanese government hired foreign teachers, engineers, lawyers, and administrators, and used them to train Japanese successors. The intention behind importing knowledge was to eventually domesticate it. The foreign expert was not a threat to Japanese sovereignty, but was merely a temporary instrument of Japanese national development.

Many postcolonial states on the other hand chose a different path. After independence, countries across Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia understandably wanted their institutions to be run by their own citizens. Accordingly, many of them, like Jamaica, Trinidad, Nigeria, etc., implemented localization policies. The desire of a nation not wanting to be staffed indefinitely by outsiders, especially after colonial rule, was entirely legitimate. The serious issue though, was never whether locals should eventually control their institutions—because of course they should—but one of timing. Localization was often treated as an achievement in itself rather than as the eventual end point of a successful transfer of competence. Foreign experts, including teachers, engineers, doctors, and administrators, were expelled or discouraged before local systems had acquired the habits, standards, and organizational discipline needed to replace them. The result was not empowerment but a gradual hollowing-out. On paper, the institutions became more national. In practice, many simply became less capable, with education shows the cost most clearly.

The developing world has spent decades expanding school enrollment. Governments built classrooms, hired teachers, abolished fees, and celebrated rising attendance. International organizations praised increased access. But access to schools does not mean the children are actually learning. The scale of the failures are staggering. In Sub-Saharan Africa, 94.1 percent of fifteen-year-olds reportedly fail to reach basic skills in mathematics and science. Even among the minority of that age group actually enrolled in school, nearly 90 percent fail to reach those thresholds. This is not simply a story of children being kept out of classrooms. Increasingly, it is a story of children being processed through classrooms without mastering the basics. The longer-run literacy data are even worse. Across 87 developing countries, surveys tracking birth cohorts from the 1950s through the late 1990s show that the quality of schooling has often declined even as attendance has risen. Measured by whether someone who completed five years of school can actually read, education quality fell by roughly two to four percentage points per decade for women across the developing world. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the decline between the 1960s and 1990s cohorts was about 25 percentage points for both men and women. What is commonly praised as “progress” is more often just institutional decay hidden behind enrollment statistics.

India is yet another one of the clearest examples. A child born in 1958 who completed five years of schooling had about a 90.7 percent chance of being able to read as an adult. For a child born in 1995 with the same five years of schooling, the figure was only 53.8 percent, a collapse of nearly 37 percent. It’s not as though the country forget what reading was, nor was it lacking in schools altogether. What deteriorated was the system’s ability to turn years of schooling into actual learning. India is an important example because it did inherit real educational institutions, including the University of Calcutta, the University of Bombay, and other colleges and technical schools that were built during the colonial era to transmit usable knowledge to a local population. After independence, India continued building institutions, but too much of the political atmosphere treated foreign influence as something to be escaped rather than exploited. A wiser strategy would have been to do what Japan had done earlier and what Singapore and South Korea later did so well: use foreign expertise aggressively, learn from it, adapt it, and then make it national.

National pride and imported knowledge are not enemies. In fact, national pride should demand competence. A country that refuses outside expertise before it has mastered the relevant skills is not asserting independence. Many of these postcolonial countries were choosing weakness and sugarcoated this reality with patriotic language.

Nigeria and Ghana tell different versions of the same story. Nigeria once had a functioning primary education system by developing-country standards. Among those in the mid-1950s birth cohort who completed five years of school, 61.9 percent could read as adults. By the late 1990s cohort, however, that figure had fallen to 26.2 percent. Ghana by contrast began from a lower baseline and remained poor by the same measure, with literacy conditional on five years of schooling still around 18 to 19 percent in recent assessments. The paths were different, but the destination was the same: more schooling, less learning.

Ghana’s case is especially revealing because the failure cannot simply be blamed on neglect. Colonial officials there had invested in public education and adult literacy and presided over significant schooling reforms. However, after gaining independence, Ghana’s educational trajectory was derailed by mounting economic difficulties that severely constrained funding for the sector. Compounding this was the fact that education became increasingly politicized and enlisted for ideological purposes, producing repeated discontinuities in reform efforts that prevented any coherent, sustained improvement from taking hold. While the country adopted free compulsory basic education in 1994, and gross primary enrollment rose from around 92 percent to 99 percent over the survey period examined by researchers, literacy and numeracy for people at the same level of schooling fell sharply. Among those with upper primary education, the probability of reading a short sentence was about 14 percentage points lower in 2017 than in 2006. For lower-primary students, the probability of answering a basic written calculation correctly fell by roughly 26 percentage points. Ghana’s result could appropriately be described as the nightmare version of educational policy. While the state expands access and congratulates itself for its own self-perceived virtues, it has only failures to show for results.

To preemptively address a potential criticism: no, the results cannot simply be dismissed purely as mere compositional effects. Yes, expanded enrollment tends to bring poorer and more disadvantaged children into school, and that can lower averages. But the evidence cited in the original research suggests later cohorts were not simply worse quality material. If anything, the students were often healthier and better nourished than earlier cohorts. Furthermore, the deterioration in many countries predates the major waves of fee abolition and rapid enrollment expansion, ruling out the simple explanation that quality fell because too many children entered the system at once. In India, for example, the decline in learning outcomes among those who completed primary school was already underway in cohorts born in the 1960s, long before the most dramatic enrollment surges of the 1990s and 2000s. The decline appears to be in what schools were doing, and not merely in who entered them.

Worse still, what little learning does occur is also often thin and brittle. Studies in rural India found that many students who could answer familiar textbook-style questions failed when asked to apply the same knowledge in a slightly different form. For example, many tertiary students could not correctly measure a pencil when it was not aligned at zero on a ruler. Additionally, just 54.4 percent of rural youth who had completed secondary school and were enrolled in undergraduate programs could correctly solve a simple elapsed-time problem. Schooling was more akin to a ritual than a practical investment. Students passed through grades, sit for exams and collected credentials, all the while still lacking the basic conceptual equipment that education is supposed to provide.

It’s evident to see from all this why foreign expertise matters. Not because foreigners are magical. Not because locals cannot learn. The whole point is that locals can learn, but learning requires time and transmission. Critical components of successful education systems such as pedagogy, curriculum design, school inspection, teacher training, assessment, administrative discipline, and institutional expectations do not appear out of nowhere. Rather, someone has to know how to do them, and someone else has to learn them. The missionary record is uncomfortable for many development scholars precisely because it shows this so clearly. Christian missions in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere were not just religious enterprises. They were also educational institutions. Research by Nathan Nunn and Rossella Calvi, among others, has traced long-run effects of missionary activity on literacy, numeracy, health, and social trust. Whatever one thinks of their theology or motives, missionaries often supplied something desperately scarce: disciplined external agents who built schools, trained students, and transmitted habits of learning that lasted beyond their own presence. It is clear then that outside educators can matter enormously when domestic systems are weak.

Aside from Japan, Singapore is another shining example that grasped this. Lee Kuan Yew did not treat foreign expertise as an insult, but instead as reconnaissance. Singapore studied Britain, the United States, Israel, and other advanced countries to find out what worked while recruiting foreign talent, partnered with major universities, imported research capacity, and used English law and administration as assets rather than treating them as stains of colonialism. The result was not some kind of cultural surrender. Singapore became one of the most distinctively successful societies on earth.

Vietnam offers another useful contrast. It is a country which remained poor by conventional measures and did not simply buy its way into success with lavish spending. The share of Vietnamese women who completed five years of schooling and could read as adults rose from around 72 percent to 94 percent across cohorts. Peru also improved literacy among those completing grade five, from roughly 69 percent to 85 percent, while expanding enrollment. The collapse in quality seen elsewhere was not an inevitability, but a policy choice which led to institutional failure.

Michael Manley of Jamaica embodied a different and far more common tendency in the developing world during the same period. His political project emphasized black pride, the historical importance of slave rebellions, anti-imperialism, and the assertion of cultural autonomy against Western influence. Manley’s framework, in its emphasis on identity and historical grievance over the patient acquisition of technical capacity and institutional knowledge, offered little that could build a durable system capable of improving the prospects of the youth. Under Manley, Jamaica pursued a form of ideological self-sufficiency that left its institutions without the external expertise and standards that might have arrested their decline. Unfortunately, for much of the developing world, someone like Manley was closer to being the norm. Rather than having leaders who should have been asking how to use foreign expertise to rebuild education systems, most were instead ruled by ideological demagogues asking how to demonstrate independence from foreign influence. The rhetoric was empowering; the outcomes were much less so.

The common excuse that poor countries merely need more money is clearly inadequate then. Money helps only when the system itself is organized around learning. It does not do much good on its own when the system is organized around enrollment numbers (goodharting a metric of developmental quality), patronage, ideology, credentialing, or bureaucratic self-preservation. A school system can have all the structures of a proper education: teachers, buildings, official curricula, and ministry reports, while still failing at its only real job. The uncomfortable truth is that many postcolonial states became more interested in proving that foreigners were no longer needed than in making sure their children could read. Anti-colonial rhetoric supplied dignity, but it did not train teachers. Nationalist speeches did not produce mathematics instruction. Replacing expatriates with locals may have looked like sovereignty, but if the transfer of knowledge had not happened first, the schools and the people paid the price.

Foreign expertise should not be a permanent substitute for domestic capacity, but instead as the means by which domestic capacity is built. The Japanese model was an instance of disciplined borrowing rather than humiliating dependence. The Singaporean model was ruthless institutional learning, not submission. The countries that understood this treated foreign knowledge as raw material for national strength, while the countries that rejected it too quickly often ended up with the symbols of independence and the substance of decline.

What the developing world does not need more of is sentimental talk about access while children leave school unable to read. It needs school systems judged by learning rather than attendance, outside standards where local standards have collapsed, teachers who can teach, inspectors who can inspect, curricula that build knowledge, and administrators who care about whether students learn anything at all.

Brain drain undeniably matters. But brain gain may matter more. The tragedy is that many countries spent decades worrying about their educated citizens leaving, while doing too little to import the expertise that could have educated the next generation at home.