One of the most interesting statements to come out of the recent visit to the UK by President Uhuru Kenyatta, was that “unemployed Kenyan nurses” would soon have the opportunity to work in the UK under an arrangement between the two governments.
This good news was actually misreported. It is not “unemployed Kenyan nurses” that the UK would welcome. Kenyan nurses have been privately finding jobs in UK hospitals long before this announcement was made, and they were not those of the “unemployed” variety.
Rather it was the cream of Kenyan nurses – the best and the most experienced – who successfully made this transition. Given the kind of salary paid to nurses in the UK (which comes in at an average of about Sh250,000 a month) you can see why an experienced Kenyan nurse would drool at the prospect of a job in the UK.
What has prevented more young Kenyan women (and men) from taking advantage of such opportunities is that the Kenyan authorities have not created the structures that would facilitate this.
In this field we could borrow a leaf from The Philippines, which has long been a global leader in what economists plainly define as 'the exporting of nurses' to richer nations.
To get an idea of their success in this field, you only need to consider that with a national population of about 108 million, which is roughly twice that of Kenya (projected by the UN to be about 54 million) The Philippines has about 250,000 nurses working overseas.
One academic study estimated that, “Remittances from overseas Filipino workers of all occupations have grown from U.S.$290.85 million in 1978 to U.S.$10.7 billion in 2005. A large portion of this comes from international service providers, with nurses constituting the largest group of professional workers abroad.”
Where do all those nurses come from? Well, The Philippines has about 450 registered nursing schools, most offering a four-year Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree.
And according to a CNN report, “By 1982, the country had already established the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA), which manages the recruitment and deployment of overseas Filipino workers…the labour export system of the Philippines has been described to be ‘unparalleled’ in its sophistication.”
Of course, all this comes at a price. First to the nurses themselves who often spend most of their productive years away from their families. Then there is the cost to the country itself, which has yet to attain the UN recommended ratio of nurses to the general population.
In other words, although the Filipina nurses working abroad provide a crucial economic support system to their families back home, and also a valuable source of foreign exchange to their country through remittances, this also denies the Philippines health sector the full complement of skilled medical staff that it needs.
And that is much the same situation here in Kenya: we have thousands of unemployed nurses, and our public health centres and clinics all over the country are severely understaffed. But the county governments and the Ministry of Health cannot possibly absorb all those nurses.
What the Kenyan authorities need to recognise is that these young people are not just part of the national statistics. They represent a major investment in education, made by their families in the hope that they will then help to lift up their siblings as well as provide for their parents in due course.
So, providing them with economic opportunity should really be a national priority.
Although it is a Newly Industrialised Country, The Philippines is not usually mentioned when Kenyan commentators are listing those Asian nations that we would do well to emulate. That honour is usually reserved for Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Malaysia – all of which moved from basic agrarian poverty to industrial economies within living memory.
But when it comes to thinking globally about jobs for skilled workers, The Philippines has a lot to teach Kenya.
The global opportunities for nurses will continue to expand. Many of the richest nations in the world have ageing populations. This means that they will have more and more elderly people who need nursing care, and yet little hope of recruiting enough nurses from among their own citizens.
