Brain drain continues

The Korean International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) has been conducting training seminars on information and communications technology for the digitalization of processes in the Bureau of Internal Revenue.

How many of those who undergo training will remain with the BIR remains to be seen.

Secretary Ivan Uy of the Department of Information and Communications Technology has said the digitalization program for the shift to e-governance is hampered by the lack of ICT personnel. The government can’t even find enough people to protect various agencies from hacking, Uy told “The Chiefs” in a recent interview.

The country doesn’t lack ICT experts. Like nurses and other professionals and skilled workers, however, the techies prefer to work overseas, where the pay is way higher than what they can typically hope to get in the Philippines.

They’re tech-savvy but not crime-savvy: a number of them have fallen prey to Chinese gangs running cryptocurrency scams in Myanmar and Thailand.

Such horror stories, however, have not slowed down the wave of Pinoy ICT workers leaving for greener pastures abroad.

KOICA has also provided technical assistance to the Philippine dairy industry, working to boost milk production at the Philippine Carabao Center in Nueva Ecija. Last week I tasted the carabao milk and yogurt produced by the center and they were good, although the milk needs a label more imaginative than “fresh milk.” The “Yo!Gurt” label is a bit better.

Let’s hope the dairy workers trained by the Koreans won’t end up in the dairy farms of New Zealand; there are enough Filipinos in those farms.

BIR personnel have expressed concern that those trained by KOICA in ICT would soon leave the country.

They could end up in Taiwan, where most of the 150,000 overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) are in ICT, according to Taiwan’s newly arrived resident representative in the Philippines, Wallace Minn-Gan Chow.

Like nurses and other OFWs, those in ICT are in demand because of their English proficiency. Representative Chow and several other officials of the Taiwan Economic and Cultural Office in Manila told The STAR in a meeting last week that in 2021, when there was an opening for foreign English teachers in Taiwan, 80 of the 200 who were hired were Filipinos.

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Some years ago, this brain drain was felt keenly in the Philippines’ education sector, when even public school teachers preferred to work as maids overseas than practice their profession in their own country. The exodus of teachers slowed down only when the government gave educators in public schools a substantial salary hike.

These days the brain drain is reaching crisis proportions in certain sectors, with the most dramatic impact felt in the health system.

That plan of Health Secretary Ted Herbosa for government hospitals to hire nursing graduates who flunked the board exam is an act of desperation as the exodus of nurses continues.

Only graduates who scored 72-74 in the board exam – meaning they nearly passed – will be hired, Herbosa said. But they still flunked the exam, and the Professional Regulation Commission said such graduates can’t be issued temporary or special licenses. The emerging compromise is to hire the graduates as nursing assistants.

A nursing organization said the government should instead hire nurses with proper licenses. But this presumes that such nurses want to work in the Philippines. If they did, they would have already heeded the repeated calls for nurses, issued by both government and private hospitals since the start of the COVID pandemic.

I know a number of nursing graduates who passed the board exam but instead opted to work at call centers while waiting for an overseas job placement.

The Philippines is not the only one facing this predicament. Workers from less-affluent states are leaving in droves for jobs in higher-income economies, with no quick replacement for the brain and skills drain especially in the poorest countries.

There is currently an international discussion on ways of dealing with this problem.

Last April, then Department of Health officer-in-charge Maria Rosario Vergeire told The Chiefs that the government was exploring the possibility of negotiating with certain countries for a form of “ethical recruitment” that will help labor-exporting countries deal better with the loss of their workforce.

Migrant Workers Secretary Toots Ople says the government has in fact been working to ensure ethical recruitment of OFWs, but what Vergeire has in mind gives the term a new dimension.

Taiwan might provide some inspiration. Representative Chow told us that all foreign workers are limited to a total of 10 years of employment in Taiwan. An OFW can work under a five-year contract in Taiwan, get a job in another country for three years, and then return to Taiwan for another five-year contract. At the end of that second contract, the 10 years on a working visa are up.

Vergeire’s concern, however, is a quick replacement for the health professionals that the Philippines is losing.

Our schools are churning out the graduates that we need. How to get them to work in their own country is the challenge.

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CORRECTION: In a recent column, I wrote that the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency’s South District Office is housed at Camp Bagong Diwa in Taguig. The office, which was raided for drugs last December by the police, is in another building in Upper Bicutan. My apologies.