If we are going to feast on frogs let’s pick the juicy ones – Part II

Last week we explored the possible long-term impact of exporting young Ugandan workers into the Middle East. This column argued that some of the impacts could be unintended, such as dislocations in gender social relations.

 Others are more positive and are already happening. In response to the story, a young woman shared her story with me. Five or so years after she left Uganda with just an O-Level certificate, she has been able to buy and develop a piece of land. All some of the contemporaries she left behind have to show in the same period are babies and big stomachs. For every horror story, there are many more such stories of houses built, school fees paid, and grandmothers treated.  

Yet as heart-warming as the positive stories might be, labour externalisation, like cost-cutting in companies, is not a business strategy. It is a sign of one that has failed or is failing, in this case to create enough high-quality jobs in the economy.  

A key defect in this tactic of sending young people abroad to solve the unemployment crisis at home is that it is a product of basic first-order thinking. There is little difference between exporting a bag of green coffee beans and a primary-school dropout whose only asset is chest-power and the ability to mop floors.

 What happens when our sisters in Malawi or some other backwater even worse off than us discover that they can mop floors in the Middle East better than our girls, and are willing to work for half the pay? Our girls would be replaced so fast, some of them would return home on camelback.

 As unpleasant as it might be to most sensibilities, the export of young Ugandans to work abroad has become such an important pressure valve to the underperforming economy that it needs to be defended and taken higher up the value chain. We must pick the fattest frog from the swamp.

 Here are three quick ideas. The first is to prepare the young men and women going abroad better. It isn’t clear what training, if any, is currently provided but basic numeracy and literacy would be mandatory. In addition, these young people need to be given important life skills beginning with understanding the cultures of their destination countries, as well as soft things like good manners; saying thank you, waiting in line, respecting rules, and generally conducting themselves in ways different from the typical young Ugandan. Once they learn to eat in moderation and not heap the dessert on top of the mains, they can be moved up to more complex ideas like financial literacy to help them manage their money better.

 The second thing is to move up the skills value chain. Any poor country can export maids or young men who can be trained to stand guard outside shops – it is raw power of which we have neither a monopoly nor competitive advantage. 

But if we were training and exporting plumbers or electricians and other higher-skilled tradespeople, they – and the country – would earn more, and they would have better job security, including across countries. 

 The third way is to take a quantum leap of imagination and target even higher skills sets and more lucrative export markets. Take Japan, for example. Many Ugandans made fortunes exporting cars, spare parts and equipment from the Asian country to Uganda in the 1980s and 90s, before China entered the picture.

 But the population in Japan, like in many rich countries, is growing older and smaller. In the not-so-distant future, there will be demand for health workers to take care of rich, ageing Japanese. The opportunity is to train a generation of young Ugandan nurses and health workers at the high end of the skills spectrum, and match this with language and culture skills tailored for Japan or other countries with similar dilemmas.

 The benefits should be obvious. They would settle in much faster and easily and earn a lot more money. Their skills would be easily transferrable to other countries and particularly useful to Uganda when and if they chose to return home. 

 I also suspect that young people in some rich countries, who at present have to be bribed by their government to have babies, might, on being presented with smart, talented and beautiful and handsome Ugandans, seriously reassess their life choices. 

 How is that for value addition to our exports? If you have to eat frogs it is easy when you are big in Japan.

Mr Kalinaki is a journalist and  poor man’s freedom fighter. 

[email protected] 

Twitter: @Kalinaki