17 January 2025, NIICE Commentary 12259
Dr. Md. Abdul Latif & Shirin Sultana
Scroll through Bangladeshi social media and a pattern appears: airport selfies, foreign campuses, snowy streets abroad. Behind each image is a familiar story—a doctor joining health services in the US, an engineer moving to Canada, a researcher on a European scholarship. “Brain drain” is the polite term for a harsher reality: the steady loss of a country’s most educated people to richer, largely Global North states. This is not a few students returning with experience, but a sustained shift as doctors, engineers, academics, and other professionals settle abroad, while the country that trained them struggles with growing shortages.
Each year, thousands of Bangladesh’s brightest leave for Canada, the US, the EU or Australia, seeking better pay, security, and respect. Once, migration was a survival strategy; now the departure of skilled workers reveals a contradiction: what sustained the economy is draining its future. Talent-flows from countries like Bangladesh are often celebrated as an opportunity, but behind the success stories is a stark loss of human capital that weakens health systems, slows innovation, and undermines self-reliance. Brain drain is not just economic; it is a political question of development justice.
The Pull of the Global North and The Ethics of Talent Extraction
Migration is often framed as personal choice, yet rich countries actively shape those “choices.” Facing aging populations and labor gaps, states in the Global North design policies to attract skilled workers from places like Bangladesh.
Bangladesh’s young, educated, digitally savvy population has become a recruitment target. As demand for healthcare staff, engineers, and tech workers grows, wealthy nations intensify efforts to draw talent from the Global South. After COVID-19, many European states eased entry for foreign medical staff; Canada recruits nurses and IT experts from South Asia. Meanwhile, prospects at home are limited: rural doctors are underpaid, researchers lack funding, and entrepreneurs face heavy bureaucracy. Migration becomes less a free choice than a rational escape from structural stagnation.
This raises ethical questions: Is it fair for rich countries to benefit from doctors trained with Bangladesh’s public funds? Should their labor shortages be solved at the expense of the Global South’s development?
Today’s talent extraction echoes older dependency. Where colonialism drained raw materials, current migration channels siphon intellectual capital. Bangladesh’s English-speaking, globally trained middle class is absorbed into richer markets, deepening inequality under the banner of “mobility.” The issue is not people’s right to leave, but whether global rules can make talent flows mutual and developmental, rather than one-sided and extractive.
What We Lose When Our Best Minds Leave
When skilled graduates leave Bangladesh, the first loss is economic. Doctors and engineers trained at public expense become a subsidy from poor taxpayers to rich countries when they settle abroad. A doctor educated in Dhaka but practicing in London is a public investment serving another state.
The second loss is institutional. Health systems, universities, and the civil service steadily lose talent. Hospitals and rural clinics face shortages; universities lose potential teachers and researchers; capable officials look overseas instead of building careers at home. This erodes state capacity, weakens policy-making, and hampers basic services.
Health shows this most sharply. Bangladesh already has too few doctors and nurses, while richer states actively recruit them with better pay and facilities. Patients at home endure long waits and overworked staff, while publicly trained doctors fill foreign vacancies.
The pattern repeats in higher education and technology. Public universities produce bright engineers and computer scientists, but with scarce research funds, weak labs, and uncertain careers. Overseas scholarships become exit routes from a system that cannot use their skills. Each non-returning graduate means lost teams, firms, and future students.
Brain drain is thus not just about departure, but about its impact on the economy, institutions, and Bangladesh’s ability to direct its own development. Losing skilled workers deepens a knowledge gap, increases reliance on foreign expertise and technology, and weakens confidence in self-reliance just as the country seeks a knowledge-based economy.
The Myth of the Remittance Dividend
Remittances have long served as a political safety valve in Bangladesh’s economy. In 2024, they brought in about $23.9 billion, easing deficits and sustaining consumption. But this apparent success masks a deeper imbalance. Most remittances come from low- and semi-skilled workers in Gulf countries, not from the skilled professionals who migrate to the West.
These funds largely cover household expenses rather than productive investment, and they seldom generate technology transfer, research partnerships, or industrial development. Policymakers praise remittance inflows but ignore the forgone tax revenue, innovation, and institutional leadership that emigrating professionals might have provided. The myth of a “remittance dividend” conceals a long-term structural deficit in human capital.
From Brain Drain to Fair Brain Circulation
The goal is not to stop migration, but to turn “brain drain” into “brain circulation” — a two-way flow where knowledge, skills, and resources move between Bangladeshi migrants and their homeland.
Bangladesh can move in this direction by:
- Creating return incentives such as research grants, startup funding, and faculty exchange or visiting scholar programs.
- Strengthening ties with the diaspora to support mentorship, technology transfer, collaborative research, and investment networks.
- Negotiating fair migration agreements with destination countries that include training partnerships, skills recognition, and reintegration support.
- Investing in domestic research and innovation ecosystems so that young professionals see credible futures at home, not only abroad.
Countries like South Korea, China, and Taiwan once saw large outflows of talent but reversed them by aligning education, industrial policy, and innovation incentives. Bangladesh has the talent to do the same — if it creates compelling reasons for its citizens to stay, return, and build.
Yet this is not only a Bangladeshi question; it is a global one. Today’s system allows the Global North to relieve its labor shortages with professionals trained at the expense of the Global South. The result is a quiet transfer of public investment from poorer states to richer ones, and a deepening capacity gap.
Bangladesh, with its young population and growing economy, stands at a turning point. The real challenge is not whether people will move — they will — but whether that movement can be made fair, reciprocal, and development-enhancing, rather than extractive.
If talent truly has no borders, then responsibility for nurturing and sharing it should not have borders either.
Dr. Md. Abdul Latif (PhD in Development Policy) is Global Ambassador & ADB-JSP Scholar & Additional Director at Bangladesh Institute of Governance and Management (BIGM), Bangladesh & Shirin Sultana is a Research Associate at the Bangladesh Institute of Governance and Management (BIGM).
