Lawmakers warn of brain drain

2008-05-22 19:08

Rabat - African lawmakers expressed concern on Thursday over the continent's brain drain and said it was time to tap the potential of Africans living in Europe.

"There's a brain drain at a time when the African continent is most in need," Pie Ntavyohanyuma, a top official at the African Parliamentary Union (APU) told a conference in Morocco on migration.

"We must take steps, together with our European partners, to ensure that immigrants in Europe participate in the economic development of their countries of origin," Ntavyohanyuma said.

International Labour Organisation official Awad Ibrahim said the best solution was to create jobs at home, so that emigration became a choice, "not a last resort".

Melegue Traore, an APU representative from west Africa, stressed it was crucial to see emigration as a positive historical phenomenon and pointed to the importance of inter-African migration.

"It's only when movement within Africa becomes extremely difficult that illegal emigration towards Europe grows," he said.

The president of the Moroccan parliament, Mustapha Mansouri, judged Europe-Africa co-operation on immigration to be "insufficient" and overly concerned with security issues, such as land and sea border patrols.

Instead, he pressed for social, political and economic reforms to "quash emigration's main causes: poverty, unemployment and insecurity".

- AFP