₦airaland Forum

I don’t have time to read the epistle, as afar as concerned,the writer must be high on Sapele water, all you have to do is to go around west embassies in Nigeria, Check the rate at which people are paying visa fees,and British Council is selling IELTS, u fit come back after to write with clear eyes

My uncle took a bold step, even when the Nigerian Economy was in a better shape mid 90s after working at a US mall as a sales officer and today, he's an employer of labour. He hit it big when the ATM revolution erupted in our banking industry, becoming a leading service provider to many commercial banks in Nigeria. The white men from whom he got the solutions, first refused him the opportunity to bring same to Africa because they felt since it was a relatively new idea to the continent, it would be very difficult to sell by a black man to his fellow black people due to our mentality that whatever a white man brings will be preferred over what the black man offers, even though the latter has a much better solution/idea/product. The company called him a few months later after much persistent efforts, for a free training and the rest is history. my uncle came back home with ''the can do spirit'' and while he was leaving, his fellow nigerians working 1000USD a month mocked him, they even said they had charmed him and his family demons had concluded on drawing him back home, lol. He damned their mockery and empathy and came back home. This man won the best distributor of the year 4 consecutive times with cash prizes attached to it and that was what changed the US company's mentality. Now, they are planning to set up a plant in Nigeria to cut cost.

I learned from my uncle's bold step and emulated him. Though i drank Gari for some months and always on my footwagen, lol. Today, the rest is history. I thank God for the bold step taken back then. While some Nigerian workers would go on vacation overseas , paying hugely on accommodation, ticket and transport within their country of choice, I go almost on almost all-expense-paid trips 3 to 4 times a year. I am always chauffeur-driven from the airport with my partners raising placard containing my name at their airport arrivals as soon as my flight landed, lodged me in 5-star hotels for free, enjoyed spars ( i remembered the first time my business partner in Germany told me spar was part of my hotel package and I only got to know on the last day of my visit, lol). What more can I say and what is the moral of my long story? there are millions of opportunities here. Amazingly, each time me and my uncle travel, the experience is always the same because those we left behind would always count on us to foot their bills over there. We resorted not to inform them anymore each time we go on a visit to those countries. They cannot part with ordinary 100USD. Ask them to send you just 50USD and you would be shocked what you would experience subsequently. they would stop picking your calls, they would bar you from whatsapp, etc. Do not blame them too because they have got myriads of unending bills to pay. My in-law's mum died and he could not come home, he wept, wept and wept over there, after which he sent a token home for rites. Same happened to a friend of mine whose father died. He could not come come until 2 years after his father had been laid to rest. Meanwhile, the white men they work for can take vacation trips , travel to any part of the world any time they choose,what would you call that, freedom or slavery? To those who are eager to travel, no problems. But if you stay there for more than 2 years and yet, you have not been able to tap into opportunities and rush back home to invest, before you look back and say jack, you are already old with nothing to show for living in america or UK. Have a nice day all.

Brain-gain move good but be careful about timing.

KushyKush:
I doubt the credibility of this research.

Seems to me like shìt load of crap just to make it seem like people are coming back "home"

You will always doubt, because you believe success only comes from abroad. some Nigerians I know came back home after studies and they're doing well here.

I think its quite the opposite, if I ever have the opportunity to leave this sh1t hole country, I will never return

socialconscious:
In July 2017, Alexandra Ndiwalana, 28, moved back to Johannesburg, South Africa after ten months of pursuing her MBA at the IE Business School in Madrid. By returning home right after completing her studies abroad, Ndiwalana joined an emerging crop of African graduates that seem to be reversing the continent’s long-running brain drain problem. It’s a trend that offers some hope of bridging the continent’s huge skills gap.

Nearly 70% of African MBA students at the top 10 US and European schools planned to return home and work after graduation, found a survey by Jacana Partners, a pan-African private equity firm. Another study shows nine in ten African PhD students studying abroad plan to work on the continent.

Motivations behind the trend are understandable given the once-promising “Africa rising” narrative and the continent being home to some of the world’s fastest-growing economies.

Today, however, that narrative has grown increasingly doubtful due to a downturn in the commodities boom that had driven it in the decade running up to 2015. With slowing economic growth, the longstanding lack of infrastructure, corruption and high unemployment challenges, it would be difficult to make an impact—even if you’re an expensively trained graduate from a top American or European university.

When Ndiwalana left her job as a management trainee at a multinational brewery and beverage company in South Africa, she went to Spain with plans to “do everything she could to stay.” She applied for jobs long before graduation, but hiring preferences foiled her overseas ambitions. Reactions to job interviews betrayed the same sentiment: “You’re a great candidate; if only you were European.”

Disappointed and disillusioned, Ndiwalana set her sights on returning home partly because she didn’t want to become like many of her peers who settled for positions for which they were clearly overqualified. She says many sacrificed career advancement simply for the chance to remain in Europe or North America.

“In the West, it seems like there’s a glass ceiling—le plafond de verre—that cannot be broken,” says Chams Diagne, founder of Talent2Africa, a Dakar-based recruitment agency that specializes in bringing African talent home. “People are moving back to grow their careers faster.”

Ndiwalana became one such example. Soon after coming back to South Africa, she landed a senior marketing analytics role at Uber’s Sub-Saharan Africa division.

The reverse-migration trend has led to the rise of professional matchmaking and networking services, like Talent2Africa and others such as Movemeback and MBTN Global—both based in the UK—that pair diaspora talent with opportunities in Africa.

Regardless of talk of an economic downturn, the international corporations—beyond traditional energy and commodity players—opening up in fast-growing African cities suggest a different reality on the ground. “Most western organizations are investing more in Africa because Africa is the next frontier,” Diagne says.

This has led to a notable trend where multinationals on the continent are contributing to the brain gain movement. Several of these corporates are now replacing expatriates with top talent from the diaspora, says Diagne. The companies and international NGOs usually cite reasons such as cost (paying salaries midway between a local’s and an expatriate’s), cultural ties, and security—where “repat” executives might “blend in” and speak the local language.

“There’s typically a pay cut some people need to come to terms with,” Diagne says, comparing it with what a manager or an executive might be paid in dollars or euros in New York or Paris. But while it might seem unfair, he says employers make great efforts to sweeten their offers to returnees by providing free or discounted housing, transportation, education or assistance with student loans.

One such returnee who accepted a pay cut on relocating to South Africa is Guy Kamguia, a Cameroonian-American and Harvard Business School alum. Prior to moving to South Africa in 2016, Kamguia, 32, worked as an associate with the global markets management team at Credit Suisse in New York. “I took a 20% to 30% pay cut from what I was making,” Kamguia says.

But he didn’t mind earning less because in the US he wasn’t making the kind of impact to which he aspired. Now, as strategic business manager for Africa growth and strategy at Philafrica Foods, Kamguia is finally realizing his dream of developing manufacturing on the continent by acquiring and building food processing plants throughout Sub-Saharan Africa.

“If you have an MBA, a law or medical degree, yes you’ll take a pay cut, but if you factor in the cost of living and do the math, you’re actually saving more,” he says.

Kamguia says more of his friends who were African students at business school are going back home. “There’s a genuine sense that if you’re not going back to fix Africa, who is going to do it? There is a sense of responsibility.”

That sense that there’s more to your work experience than simply earning the fattest paycheck has been well covered with millennials in western countries and it’s no different for young Africans, particularly those that seem to have the world at their feet, thanks to their world-class degrees.

“Something’s happening more generally where young people are looking for something better aligned with their internal compass,” says Oyin Solebo, co-founder of London-based Movemeback.

Since Movemeback’s launch in 2014, the company has grown to over 10,000 members, the biggest concentration of which fall between ages of 28 and 35. They have partnerships with elite internationals schools including Harvard, Columbia, Cambridge and Oxford.

Chatter about moving to Africa grows louder around graduation time, says Bradley Mensah, president of Columbia University’s African Students Association. Africans used to believe prosperity was only possible by leaving Africa for the Western countries, he says. Now, there is a “perception that prosperity is possible on the continent as well.”

For Adabara Abdullahi, founder of MBTN Global, the returnee’s motives for relocating are more nuanced depending on whether or not the returnee was born on the continent and the financial status of African-born migrants. While first-generation Western citizens of African descent are often driven by Sankofa ideals of reconnecting with their roots and elevating the continent, the story isn’t quite the same for those born on the continent.

“Most people who come to the UK or to the US from [Africa] to go to university, upon graduation, what they want to do is stay. They want to stay and they want to get some work experience here.

“The people who upon graduating want to move back are either people from really wealthy families who upon graduating, return home and join the family business,” he says, “or people who upon graduation, their student visas have run out and they’re not able to find a job that will sponsor a work visa for them, so they have no choice but to move back.”

Maudo Jallow, a recent MS graduate at the London School of Economics, falls in the former group. After spending nine years abroad attending university and boarding school, the 23-year-old is happy to be back on the continent. He says his parents sent him abroad with the desire to get the “best education” and return to Gambia—not to take over the family business as such but to continue in the footsteps of his father, a UN official in Uganda.

“Unfortunately, our institutions aren’t valued globally so to get the best education, you need to go to elite universities abroad. It’s almost fashionable,” Jallow says. But realistically, “we don’t need everybody to move back. “Move back if you have money to fall back on, an idea to implement or a tangible way to contribute.”

With Brexit, the Trump presidency and increasingly restrictive immigration policies, the trend is likely to increase, says Tomiwa Igun, founder of the Young African MBAs, a voluntary membership group. More undergrads talk about heading home after their visa work permit expires, says Igun.

“People are not willing to go through the hustle to stay in the US,” adds Zainab Raji, YAM’s Communications Lead. In recent months, Raji has also noticed more of her peers in the UK moving back. “It’s a combination of Brexit and it’s hard to get jobs.”

More people are taking the plunge knowing it’s not going to be rosy when you land. This has consequently spurred entrepreneurship and a startup culture.

Some of those entrepreneurs are returnees like Obinna Ukwuani, a Nigerian-American and MIT graduate who moved to Nigeria two years ago with the vision of building a secondary school that would give young Nigerians the technical skills to trigger a “technological and industrial revolution” in the country. Instead, he founded NESA by Makers [url]nesa.makers.ng[/url], a Lagos-based coding academy that trains novice coders in their mid to late twenties to be employable web developers.

Ukwuani also says returnees need to a “soft landing” before moving back, which means having a variety of financial and social safety nets to cushion the impact of relocating to Africa and ease acclimatization.

Nigeria’s recession has affected the return-migration trend there. There was a migration boom up until around 2015, Ukwuani noticed. Now, the economic decline has stemmed the flow, the crash of the naira versus the dollar was particularly harmful to those who still had obligations to meet back in the US or Europe.

“I had friends who left immediately because they had student loans to pay,” Ukwuani says. “You can imagine you go from making $5000 a month to $500 a month, almost overnight.”

But even with those hurdles, he doesn’t see himself returninganytimeUS any time soon.

“In Nigeria, I’m home. America is meant to be a paragon of democracy but it couldn’t be farther away from it,” he says referencing president Trump. “And with Brexit, people are becoming more protectionist and more xenophobic around the world. Part of me recognizes it as human nature. Now the diaspora really needs to think hard about where home is and why they are not here.”

https://qz.com/1128778/africa-brain-drain-to-brain-gain-african-elite-graduates-head-home-as-brexit-trump-eu-close-doors/

I feel like quoting this piece of shiit!

If i hear!

mesoprogress:
Bro , I'm not blaming the west. My wife with first class has not been able to secureca job in Nigeria. What stops her from taking advantage of scholarship abroad? Brain drain will continue till we recorecognise that humans are the true resources

I hope and pray that your wife gets the scholarship abroad and succeed so that she can help set up African scholarships for Africans in African universities.
Can I have a loud amen

lol. . .when m here trying to move my a$$ over to the west. go and complete your research biko

ewa20buredi100:
i really like that MIT oh, but i no know how i go take enter with 2.2

You can gain admission there by acing your GRE TOEFL, write a good introduction letter stating why you want to be there and how you'll contribute to the development of your home country upon completion of your program

Oh

Have you seen the number of Nigerian professionals relocating to Canada? This story does not add up.

mesoprogress:
When they are still poaching through scholarships

If our government won't appreciate the talent at their disposal, someone else will

I have reason to believe it's only Nigerians that pray to get Visa in this world. Americans just tender passports and wait for their visas, Nigerians pray and fast to even get out of the useless place they call country Ask yourself why
that happens

samuk:
With all the problems you enumerated the Chinese are moving into Africa in droves. There is a saying in Chinese that when you get to Africa you never look back, this is how adventurous Chinese see Africa. The truth is if you are fortunate enough to find yourself in the west, get western education and acquires some skills and with the right attitude, drive and determination to make millions of dollars, the easiest way is to go back to Africa which is relatively still a virgin land and economy with very relaxed regulations. The problem is people find themselves in the west and become too westernized and lazy and rather than see the lack of infrastructure in Africa as opportunities, they see them as barrier to success. Aliens did not come from space to built America and the west, they also had similar problems we are having now in the past. As a born and bred African with western education and skills with the right work ethic you are opened to a vast mostly untapped continent of opportunities.

we are still on the same page. Like I said earlier,if you dont have money to start up a business or no ready job for you or you are not from the elite class, it is best not to experiment coming down here. Even me and you know that it is not easy easy here.opportunities are here but you must have the capital to pursue it. The Chinese you mentioned do not come here empty handed,they come,invest with their money and reap the benefit.

oyetunder:
please read the story well. it is about Young elites...not just empty brains who are into crude migration. We even need most of those with such myopic views to crawl away thru Libya. These young elites are not illegal entities you are referring to pls.

this thing is not the real thing.....u can't use one variable South Africa to put forward a result on the entire Africa...a lot needs to be done to fix Africa...a continent so rich yet so poor....

Amoto94:
.

.

Amoto94:
You can gain admission there by acing your GRE TOEFL, write a good introduction letter stating why you want to be there and how you'll contribute to the development of your home country upon completion of your program

So it is possible. Thank you sir.

Kindly help me with a sample of an Introduction letter for an Industrial Chemistry graduate

ewa20buredi100:
So it is possible. Thank you sir.

Kindly help me with a sample of an Introduction letter for an Industrial Chemistry graduate

Visit this link https://www.mastersportal.eu/articles/2093/motivation-letter-example-student-applying-to-master-in-international-information-systems.html

Amoto94:
Visit this link https://www.mastersportal.eu/articles/2093/motivation-letter-example-student-applying-to-master-in-international-information-systems.html

Thank you sir.
Apart from having good GRE and TOEFL scores and a good introduction letter, what else should i know and have to do?

ewa20buredi100:
Thank you sir.
Apart from having good GRE and TOEFL scores and a good introduction letter, what else should i know and have to do?

Get letter of recommendation from 2 persons one from your place of work, your lecturer. Also, try and contact a professor from the department you'd like to study and tell him why you'd like to work with him he can also recommend you to his colleagues during the selection process; use LinkedIn to connect with past alumni of the department you want to study at and ask them valuable questions.

Amoto94:
Get letter of recommendation from 2 persons one from your place of work, your lecturer. Also, try and contact a professor from the department you'd like to study and tell him why you'd like to work with him he can also recommend you to his colleagues during the selection process; use LinkedIn to connect with past alumni of the department you want to study at and ask them valuable questions.

As regards to my place of work; i am currently not working for now. The previous work i had was a teaching job and i didn't really have a good relationship with the propietor of the school due to salary wahala.

What should i do?
Thanks

ewa20buredi100:
As regards to my place of work; i am currently not working for now. The previous work i had was a teaching job and i didn't really have a good relationship with the propietor of the school due to salary wahala.

What should i do?
Thanks

I don't know

Amoto94:
I don't know

Thanks bro. Na to continue with Nigeria University win am oh