Quartz Africa
Obinna Ukwuani moved to Nigeria from the US (Ukwuani)
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.
“In the West, it seems like there’s a glass ceiling—”le plafond de verre”—that cannot be broken.” 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 the 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 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 seems 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.
“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.” 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
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.”
After
Nigeria’s recession, some left “because they had student loans to pay.
Going from making $5,000 a month to $500 a month, overnight.” 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, 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 returning to the US 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.”
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