Least Developed Countries' Report 2012 launched
Accra, Nov. 26, GNA - A report on harnessing remittances and diaspora knowledge to build productive capacities of Least Developed Countries (LDCs) was launched in Accra on Monday.
Entitled; "The Least Developed Countries Report 2012," the 162 page report of five chapters, basically looks at yielding benefits from brain drain for home countries.
In his presentation, Mr Kwabena Baah-Duodu, a former Special Advisor of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), said among people with university level education from the 48 LDCs, about one in five left for employment elsewhere.
He said in the case of developed countries, it was one in 25.
Mr Baah-Duodu said the brain drain rate was highest of all for the LDCs at 18.4 percent, which was well above the 10 percent rate for other developing countries.
He said six of the 48 LDCs had greater numbers of highly skilled nationals living abroad than at home.
"The total of such LDCs emigrants stood at 1.3 million in the year 2000, and the figure is now estimated to exceed two million," he said.
Mr Baah-Duodu said at such high levels the adverse effects, the report argued, could outweigh the benefits from remittances that those workers sent to their families every year.
"The report says that brain drain tends to reinforce international inequalities in the availability of qualified personnel, and to damage least developed countries' prospects for long term economic growth," he said.
Mr Baah-Duodu said to counter those negative effects, UNCTAD proposed a new international support mechanism, aimed at enabling highly skilled members of LDCs to contribute to specialized knowledge transfer and to channel investment to their home countries.
The support mechanism proposed by the report is intended to reduce the risks often encountered by "diasporas" in initiating investment in their home countries, Mr Baah-Duodu said.
"It would, for example, provide diaspora members with preferential access to the seed capital required to initiate investment back home, and such financing would be available at preferential interest rates."
Ms Dyane Epstein, Chief of Mission, International Organization for Migration, said whilst migration was a basic human right, there was the need to ensure that it did not have any negative effects.
She said to that effect it was necessary to put in measures and policies that would ensure that migration did not have any dire effects, especially where these effects were in the form of losses, to the home countries of migrants which were already under-developed.
Mr Kamil Kamaluddeen, United Nations Development Project (UNDP) Country Director, said: "We cannot know the challenges of least developed countries better than they do. That is why we seek to partner with them."
Stressing on the need for LDCs to gain from brain drain, he said: "There is the need to work hard on having what it takes to keep what we have."
The launch was jointly done by Mr Baah-Duodu, Ms Epstein and Mr Kamil Kamaluddeen.
GNA...
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