No abstract

The Diversity Visa (DV) programme is designed to improve the multicultural composition of the U.S. “melting pot” beyond the traditional source countries in Europe. In pursuit of this objective, the basic eligibility requirement for participation in the programme is a high school diploma. Despite its salutary objective and design, the programme’s implications for the African brain drain may not all be benign. The “tired, poor, huddled masses” from Africa are defined in more restrictive terms, and the obstacles they face are more economically and administratively onerous than those encountered by their early European counterparts. The costs of transforming a lottery win to an actual diversity visa and Green Card are so high that only Africans in well-paying jobs, who are likely to be professionals rather than mere high school graduates, are likely to be able to afford the full costs of programme participation. In this sense, the programme has an in-built, skills-selective mechanism. The main objective of this study is to examine the extent to which the DV has facilitated the movement of professional, technical and kindred workers (PTKs) from Africa to the United States, and some of the economic and policy implications of the process.

The article investigates the potential reverse transfer of technology (brain drain) from Zimbabwe, using as case study, academic staff at the main campus of the University of Zimbabwe.A questionnaire survey was employed to separate all Zimbabwean academic staff into two groups: those who express an intention to emigrate in the near future (1-3 years) and those who express an intention to stay home.The demographic and socio-economic characteristics of the two groups are discussed, as are the factors cited for dissatisfaction with conditions at the source (the institution and the country), potential destinations, and attractions ("pull" factors) at these destinations.The study concludes that the decision to emigrate is based on an untidy combination of economic, cultural, social and geographic considerations.

The emigration of experts from Africa to the developed world is often analysed in terms of the reverse transfer of technology (RTT), a process typically described as one in which the skills embedded in an expert become part of a reverse flow of technology from the less developed to the developed world. In the reverse flow or brain gain, the African home country obtains the embedded skills of the returning expert and is able to use them towards national development efforts. The objectives of this paper are to investigate the RTT from the conceptual, empirical, and policy perspectives. At the conceptual level, the objective is to review the insights to the RTT provided in the globalization, the New Diaspora and the New Brain Drain paradigms. Empirically, the paper uses available data to make the case that even though the RTT has been marginalized in recent scholarship, it is a persistent development problem that continues to warrant scholarly and policy attention. Building on this argument, the paper outlines a model of expert migration, termed the reverse and return transfer of technology (RRTT). This model explores the decision-making of migrating experts, especially in terms of source-destination pathways and the choice of locations as either temporary or permanent homes. The policy implications of this reformulation are assessed in terms of the brain drain, the brain gain and remittances.

Despite general agreement that land reform can be a catalyst for positive rural change in sub-Saharan Africa, the means towards this end are frequently coloured in ideological hues, which manifest themselves in confounding binaries like racial justice/environmental justice, market/state and equity/efficiency. The fractures surrounding sub-Saharan land reform are most obvious in the south, where the land question traces its roots to racially motivated colonial policies. The South African government, like others in the region, is attempting to combat landlessness through market-led land reform. This article assesses the implementation of the country’s Land Restitution Programme in the Polokwane district. Its main argument is that the modernist mega-narratives, which inform the programme, create a disconnect between the state and the landless. To address this problem, the article proposes a reorientation in which local narratives will replace theoretical mega-narratives at the centre of land reform programmes.