“Brain Drain or Brain Gain” is one of the most con­tro­ver­sial top­ics and I dare not reveal my own opin­ions on that as it fits only for the experts but not for a lay­man like me.

But I could not help to share my thoughts on that. Let me, there­fore, put some effort to write it out.

Brain drain, as we all are aware of, is basi­cally referred to a great deal of emi­grants with abun­dant skills and knowl­edge who move from the source coun­try (orig­i­nal coun­try) to host coun­try (another coun­try where bet­ter oppor­tu­ni­ties can be grabbed).

Brain drain is said to be “bad” as it seems tak­ing some­thing good out of a coun­try.  It is not much sur­pris­ing that most of coun­tries suf­fer­ing brain drain are devel­op­ing coun­tries and least devel­oped coun­tries due to a lot of rea­sons like lack­ing stan­dard infra­struc­ture, poor health care, lag­ging far behind tech­nol­ogy inno­va­tions and advance­ments. Per­sonal pref­er­ence on life style can also be one of the indi­vid­ual reasons.

Back in a few decades, brain drain gave a huge headache to pol­icy mak­ers in devel­op­ing countries.

Accord­ing to an arti­cle from GlobalEnvision.org, a coun­try that sends its most skilled work­ers abroad has three key advantages:

1. Remit­tances (money sent home from abroad) go up
2. Emi­grants return with more mar­ketable skills.
3. There is a higher incen­tive for edu­ca­tion and skill development.

In 2010, work­ers remit­ted $325 bil­lion.“Migra­tion does cre­ate win­ners and losers” says The Econ­o­mist. The emo­tional toll on fam­i­lies con­tin­u­ally forced to relo­cate can be high, though less­en­ing with new tech­nol­ogy. And some skilled work­ers do not return much to their poorer homelands.”

But we,Myanmar, tra­di­tion­ally and tremen­dously believe that we have the respon­si­bil­ity to sup­port our par­ents and most of us never fail to return money even if we do not earn high income. I there­fore do not have the guts to argue on “remit­tances going up”.

What about “return­ing with more mar­ketable skill sets” and ” higher incen­tive for edu­ca­tion and skill development”?

For­get the sta­tis­tics found on the inter­net and just ask your­self if you are work­ing abroad. You are the one who can change those figures.

Though you do not return to your mother land, you still can share, as the world is flat­ter with the help of web 2.0 and social net­work­ing sites, your expe­ri­ence and exper­tise to empower the younger gen­er­a­tion through the forums, blogs and social net­work­ing sites. Need­less to say, if you are return­ing, you def­i­nitely have more chances to boost the future of your close ones — fam­ily, friends and rel­a­tives at the very least — since you prob­a­bly have bet­ter and new skills to achieve it.

A sin­gle coun­try includes a few states; a state is made up of a large num­ber of groups of peo­ple; each group has so many indi­vid­u­als which is why indi­vid­ual plays a crit­i­cal role in every sce­nar­ios includ­ing this brain drain or brain gain issue.

We, emi­grants, are hold­ing not too lit­tle power to reduce the neg­a­tive impacts of brain drain and I would very much like to encour­age you to use it unre­luc­tantly and effi­ciently since our beloved coun­try, Myan­mar, needs a vari­ety of sup­ports while remov­ing its decade-long obsta­cles up to light up the flick­ers of progress and gear­ing up to its bet­ter and brighter days.

Let brain gain rain over Myan­mar and be a part of it.

Ref: http://www.globalenvision.org

14-Dec-11