Brain Drain or Brain Train

Hey, Ben Hyman here

I’m CEO of Talent Safari, helping startups across Africa find great talent for their teams.

But today we’re looking into a different talent challenge for Africa: migration.

To understand how this is a problem, I’d like you to meet someone.

But before I make the intro, Tech Safari has something to share.

Now, into the story…

Meet Ngoth

In Uganda, a fresh university graduate earns less than $5,000 a year.

In Germany, that same graduate can earn over $50,000 in the same year.

For years, Ngoth only had access to the first option.

He grew up in South Sudan and spent most of his teenage years in Uganda’s Kiryandongo Refugee Settlement.

When he finished high school in 2022, university wasn’t an option.

The fees were simply out of reach.

As of 2025, though, Ngoth is studying applied biology in Rheinbach, Germany.

That’s thanks to Malengo, a Ugandan NGO that’s paid for his tuition, flights, and language training, in return for 14% of his future income for 10 years.

That might sound like a big ask.

But it might be small if you consider this. 👇🏾

Just by moving from one place to another, Ngoth is on track to earn 10x more for the rest of his life.

Africa’s Exodus

Ngoth is 1 out of a million Africans who leave the continent each year.

Many are seeking jobs, pursuing higher education, or simply fleeing home.

• There are close to 1 million people of Algerian origin in France.

• In 2023, 39,000 Nigerians moved to the UK on student visas.

• And Sudan’s horrific civil war has driven 4 million people to seek refuge overseas, mostly in neighbouring countries like Egypt and Uganda.

And at the same time, the world’s richest countries are opening their doors.

From Europe to Asia, governments are quietly rewriting immigration laws because they’re running out of workers.

• Finland recently introduced measures to attract more foreign labour as its workforce shrinks.

• Germany’s Skilled Immigration Act now lets qualified workers move to Germany for 12 months before securing a job offer.

• Even Japan, long known for strict immigration policies, is now inviting more overseas labour to support its aging population.

For these countries, it’s not generosity, it’s survival.

The world’s richest countries are aging.

The average German is 46 years old. The average Ugandan is only 16.

Rich countries need healthcare workers, engineers, and mechanics, and they need them now.

Admittedly, there’s a lot of backlash in the US and Europe currently, particularly towards illegal migration.

But in the long term, it seems like demographics will dominate.

And for Africans who want to earn more?

The math is simple: the best path forward is taking the invitation.

We already met Ngoth and heard about his chance to increase his income tenfold by moving to Germany.

And he’s not an outlier.

Across the board, African migrants see dramatic income jumps.

But what about the country that the migrants leave behind?

The Brain Drain Question

In the eyes of many, emigration is a disaster.

It’s often Africa's most talented people who find opportunities overseas.

If the continent’s best and brightest give up on the future of the continent to pursue opportunities overseas, then who’s left to build Africa’s future?

Take Nigeria’s tech sector, for example. 

It’s suffered an exodus of talent in the last few years.

Since 2023, the Nigerian Naira has lost over 70% of its value, and the country has been in an economic crisis.

For many local software engineers, seeing the value of their local wages fall by 70% was the final push to “japa”.

At one time, many billboards in Lagos said something like:

• “Get your US green card now”.

• “Study abroad today”.

• And even "Caribbean citizenship through investment”.

The result?

Startups that were already underfunded suddenly had another battle to fight: hiring and keeping senior engineers.

And it’s not just tech.

Look at healthcare.

Uganda has 2 doctors per 10,000 people.

Germany has 45!

People in Kampala need doctors just as much as people in Berlin.

So why would any African government spend scarce resources training nurses and physicians only to watch them head abroad?

How can this possibly benefit Africa?

The easy answer is remittance. 

Migrants like Ngoth are likely to send about 15% of their income back home each year.

And he’s not alone.

Africans abroad now send home more than $100 billion annually, over 3% of the continent’s GDP, and more than the foreign aid Africa receives.

It’s real money, changing real lives.

But is that enough to justify sending the continent’s best and brightest?

The 10-for-1 Trade

Let’s take a look at the Philippines.

When the US faced a nursing shortage, it opened up a new pathway for Filipino nurses to migrate and work.

Thousands of them took the offer.

That’s thousands of skilled nurses lost. The classic, painful story of brain drain.

Here’s the flip, though.

A study on this exact migration surge found something incredible.

For every 1 nurse who left for the US, 10 new nurses were trained and stayed in the Philippines.

The pull of that high-paying US job was so strong, it supercharged the entire local training pipeline.

It wasn't "brain drain." It was "brain gain."

The talent pool didn’t shrink; it grew.

Because when the path to a better job becomes clear, people rush to get the skills.

That dynamic matters for Africa.

And it’s exactly what the continent is missing.

Let’s do our own cold math.

Every year, 10 million young Africans enter the workforce.

But the continent creates just 3 million new jobs annually.

You don’t need to be an economist to know that’s a demographic time bomb.

Africa can't build new factories or create local jobs fast enough. That's the hard reality.

So maybe part of the solution is to embrace opportunities overseas.

If the training infrastructure is built, the promise of high-paying global jobs could be the engine that creates a massive surplus of skilled professionals for ourselves.

And don’t forget, each of those Filipino nurses sends $10,000 home each year.

Ultimately, this creates more jobs domestically as well.

Who Builds If They Leave?

But what about the entrepreneurs?

Most weeks in Tech Safari, we are busy celebrating the unique genius of Africa’s leading entrepreneurs.

So if we lose these superstars, who will build the next generation of African businesses?

Take Tope Awotona.

He left Nigeria at 12 after his father was tragically killed in a carjacking.

Today, he's the founder of Calendly, the world’s leading scheduling app,  and he’s worth $1.3 billion.

An incredible success story.

But it forces a question: what might he have built if he’d stayed in Nigeria?

It’s hard to know whether founders are replaceable if the best and brightest leave.

But we can look at who built Africa’s current unicorns.

Almost all of them studied or worked in world-class institutions outside the continent.

Olugbenga Agboola worked at Paypal and Google in the UK and US before founding Flutterwave.

Mounir Nakhla spent several years living and working in London before building MNT-Halan.

What’s the secret sauce?

Maybe it’s the working practices from being part of great institutions.

Maybe it’s the access to capital and investors.

Maybe it’s the exposure to different ways of thinking.

Whatever the mix, moving abroad seems to give African founders an edge when they return to build.

And at Tech Safari, we’re running Building Back Home to bring the next generation of African unicorn founders back to the continent.

So, Brain Drain or Brain Train?

Migration isn’t going away. 

The only real question is whether Africa treats it as a leak to plug or a system to wire up.

On an individual level, people like Ngoth are doing the rational thing: going where their skills are worth 10x more. 

On a continental level, the opportunity is to turn those personal wins into collective capacity: more skills trained, more capital flowing back, more founders returning with playbooks the ecosystem doesn’t yet have.

That’s not just “brain drain.”

It might be the largest talent investment the continent isn’t yet counting.

Africa doesn’t lose when its best people leave. It loses when they leave for good.

That’s the bridge we’re trying to build.

If you’re in the diaspora and feel the pull to build on the continent, Building Back Home is designed for you, a community, a roadmap, and a soft landing to turn global experience into African companies.

If you’re building in Africa and hungry for world-class operators, then look to Talent Safari: to match fast-growing startups with the kind of talent that might otherwise be lost to “japa”.

Brain drain or brain train is ultimately a choice.

We can keep treating migration as an emergency exit. 

Or we can turn it into the biggest talent engine Africa has ever had.

If you want to be part of that engine, whether you’re in Lagos, London, or Berlin, start here: explore roles on Talent Safari, and keep an eye out for the next Building Back Home cohort.

That’s it for this week. See you on Sunday for a breakdown on African tech news.

Cheers,

The Tech Safari Team

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