The diaspora option : a viable solution for the brain drain?
The phenomenon of skills mobility has become quite a topical issue, not just in South Africa, but worldwide. The reason for this is that in today's knowledge and skills-based economy the loss of highly qualiﬁed human resources is a critical issue for any country and especially for developing countries. Strategies have been implemented during the last three decades to counteract the brain drain, but these have not been very successful. A new and promising strategy is now emerging, this is referred to as the "diaspora option". The diaspora option seeks to mobilize highly skilled expatriates of a country to contribute to the social and economic advancement of their country of origin by ﬁnding ways of setting up links and connections between these highly skilled expatriates and the country of origin The distinguishing feature of the diaspora option is that expatriates don't have to return to the country of origin, they can stay in the host country, but contribute their skills and knowledge to their home country from wherever they are in the world. The diaspora option is quite a recent phenomenon and no systematic research has been done on the number of countries that have actually gone the diaspora route. The aim of this project was to identify and study the experiences of countries that have set up scientiﬁc/intellectual diaspora networks and to assess the success of the diaspora option. Through systematic and rigorous searches on the Internet 35 networks were identiﬁed. However, because not all of them could strictly be classiﬁed as scientiﬁc/intellectual diaspora networks, only twelve networks were chosen for analysis. After careful investigation of the information available on these networks, it is concluded that the diaspora option, although not without potential pitfalls, is indeed a viable solution to the brain drain.
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