Spokesmen of Caribbean Community governments often speak to issues pertaining to the so-called ‘brain drain’ from this region as well as the need for forging realistic working relations with the diaspora.
What remains elusive, however, is the absence of any serious coordinated regional effort to develop a sustainable programme to encourage a mutually satisfactory relationship between the Caribbean diaspora and the public and private sectors of the region.
Last week, Jamaica’s Foreign Minister, Dr Kenneth Baugh, thought it necessary to publicly urge developed nations to help provide funding for the training of skilled professionals in his country as too many skilled Jamaicans were migrating to those developed states shortly after completing their studies at home.
As the experienced Baugh would know, this problem of the outflow to the rich and developed nations of skilled West Indian nationals, often badly needed at home, is much more than a Jamaican problem.
Baugh rightly noted that his country also derived benefits from Jamaican migration, including seasonable employment, in remittances and transfer of skills. However, while there may be a moral appeal to his argument for the developed nations to help Jamaica fund the training as a form of compensation for the continuing “brain drain”, the reality is that this approach could best be pursued not on a bilateral, “but multilateral basis, given the increasing focus on multilateralism by development partners committed to dealing with CARICOM as a regional economic integration movement.
Data in the possession of the Planning Institute of Jamaica, a project event of which was the occasion for Baugh’s observations, show that over the past 20 years 54 288 such Jamaicans had migrated to the United States and Canada.
Again, other CARICOM states, among them Barbados, could replicate such a distressing scenario.
For example, the Grenada Diaspora Organisation noted in a recent statement which highlighted the “bond” between CARICOM and the Caribbean diaspora, that over the period 1886 to 2000, approximately 230 000 Grenadians had migrated from their homeland and settled primarily in four countries – United States, Britain, Trinidad and Tobago and Canada.
What seems of immediate relevance and importance, in terms of better enabling the progress of the regional economic integration movement as a whole, is for CARICOM to initiate, as priority, a project designed to produce an audit of professional skills located in the diaspora for an established Caribbean Skills Bank from which needed human resources could be drawn as the need arises.
The development of a funding mechanism to make use of the talents located in such a ‘bank’ could also be considered and in this context, the developed nations may prove helpful in a new multilateral funding initiative for CARICOM.