Nigeria can learn from other countries like India and Kenya that are exporting their brain capital into higher value-added global services markets.
These two countries, which share similar characteristics with Nigeria, have gained significantly by using Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), an earlier version of the brain exports model, to grow their economy.
According to a new PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) report, Nigeria will not be the first to take advantage of globally outsourced job functions.
“India shares some similarities with Nigeria such as a large population, a history of an underdeveloped manufacturing sector, and a federal system of government,” it said.
The report, titled ‘Brain Exports: Growing the Nigerian Economy’, said Kenya, which has been independent for a similar number of years as Nigeria and has a similar population growth rate, is beginning to see the benefit of increasing brain export activities.
Over the past 11 years, the various governments in India have given priority to science, technology, and innovation by introducing favourable government policies and infrastructure.
In 2010, Pratibha Patil, the 12th Indian president, declared the current decade as the ‘Decade of Innovation’. Patil believed that innovation would enhance entrepreneurship development and create job opportunities which would in turn accelerate economic growth.
Since then, the country has evolved into a large publicly funded research and development structure as there are now various councils and research structures under various ministries, which cater to different research areas.
Its investment in research and development has enabled the country to produce a talent pipeline and export them to the global market.
In 2021, for the first time, the country was named one of the 40 most innovative economies in the 2022 Global Innovation Index (GII). It moved up by six places in 2020.
It became the world’s largest recipient of remittances, as it received $87 billion in 2021, up from $83 billion in 2020, according to the World Bank.
The World Bank also shows that poverty in India had declined over the last decade as 10 percent of Indians were poor in 2019, down from 22.5 percent in 2011.
India was one of the first countries explored when BPO was first implemented on an international level with multiple IT companies, and call centres, setting up in the country due to the size of its talent pool and the lack of jobs to cater to the massive supply of talent within the country, analysts at PwC said.
For Kenya, its vision 2030 strategy recognises information and communications technology (ICT) as a key enabler to socioeconomic growth and development.
Launched in 2008, the aim of the strategy was to create a globally competitive and prosperous country with a high quality of life by 2030 and be the first BPO destination in Africa.
According to the strategy, it will produce 7,500 direct BPO jobs, but PwC said this value has increased to 250,000, with the sector accounting for over 10 percent of GDP.
“It has numerous outsourcing companies that cover multiple sectors. These companies rely on the country’s educated workforce and growing infrastructure to deliver high-quality, competitive services,” they said in the report.
Nigeria, Africa’s biggest economy, has made little progress in innovation and towards its transition to a knowledge-based economy as over the past few years, budgetary allocation to education has not been more than seven percent of its total budget.
It is no wonder that the United Nations Children’s Fund said the country has the highest number of out-of-school children in the world.
According to the 2022 GII, the country is ranked 114th globally and 13th in Africa. Its ranking in human development is also low as it ranked 163rd out of 191 countries, according to the United Nations Development Programme.
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Ayodele Akinwunmi, senior relationship manager, Corporate Banking Group at FSDH Merchant Bank, said innovation cannot happen without investment in human capital.
“Once you don’t develop your human capacity and you have your natural resources, you will not be able to utilise them effectively to turn them to what is productive,” he said.
He said if human capacity is developed, it will bring income generation, tax for the government and then employment generation.
Other countries that Nigeria can learn from are Qatar, United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia. Like Nigeria, these countries, which are also major producers of crude oil, are diversifying their focus from oil towards human capital development as a source of revenue.
For Qatar, its investment in education is commensurate with its National Vision 2030, which advocates finding an optimum balance between the current oil-based economy and a knowledge economy characterised by innovation and entrepreneurship, excellence in education and the efficient delivery of public services.
The government has also begun offering investors tax breaks and other incentives to support entrepreneurship and promote small and medium-sized enterprises.
Its science and technology park focuses on the four priority areas identified by the Qatar National Research Strategy of 2012, namely energy, environment, health sciences and ICT.
To achieve its goal of developing a diverse and flexible knowledge-based economy, the UAE developed its Vision 2021 plan in 2010. The plan is linked to a national strategic plan for higher education and scientific research to set up programmes for tackling problems facing the higher education sector.
The science and technology university education programme is updated to match global standards as well as strengthen scientific expertise in line with private sector requirements and national development needs
Saudi Arabia is advancing towards a diversified knowledge-driven economy. The country is focused on technology transfer in order to compensate for the paucity of various indigenous technological capacities.
In 2016, the country launched Vision 2030, a strategic framework to reduce its dependence on oil, diversify its economy, and develop public service sectors such as health, education, infrastructure, recreation, and tourism.
