With a degree in business innovation and enterprise Suzanne symbolises the hopes and aspirations of Sub-Saharan Africa, a region more commonly associated with poverty, conflict and famine. And yet the ambitious twentysomething also represents a problem for the region: the largely one-way flow of talented students and skilled professionals to Europe and North America from African countries.
Suzanne left her home city of Dschang in Western Cameroon to study at Oxford Brookes University in Britain, but chose to stay on after graduating and now works in London, having been in the country for nine years. The International Organisation for Migration would argue that her example is far from exceptional, as every year thousands of students and qualified managers, accountants, engineers and teachers leave Africa and settle abroad, looking for a better quality of life and higher wages. These students and highly skilled migrants do contribute to African economies, sending $21 billion (£13.6bn) home in 2008 according to the World Bank, but it is their adopted homes which gain the full benefit of the migrants' skills and knowledge.
It is a lack of economic development in Africa that persuades many of those who can afford to leave to migrate elsewhere. African countries continue to struggle with the underdevelopment and weak economies bequeathed by their former colonial rulers at independence in the 1960s and 1970s. Although a majority of the region's thirty-five countries achieved growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP), a standard measure of national productivity, of five percent or more in 2005 (approximately twice that of the UK in the same year) this was growth from a very low starting point. The region's combined GDP in 2008 was less than half of that of South Asia, a region which gained independence only about fifteen years earlier. What this means is little in the way of manufacturing or services sectors in many countries, and therefore few managerial or technical jobs for the tiny minority who complete higher education (an average of 6% across the region according to World Bank data). "The amount of people [in Cameroon] who are overqualified and out of a job is pitiful", says Suzanne.
This economic weakness, and the departure of scarce highly skilled labour it prompts, is puzzling when one considers the extent of Africa's natural resources. The Food and Agriculture Organisation, a United Nations agency, argues that although distributed unevenly across the continent, fertile land suitable for agriculture and water supplies exist in abundance. Africa also has significant supplies of fossil fuels, including natural gas, coal and oil. In fact West Africa, including oil-rich Nigeria, is the world's fastest growing supplier of oil. A wide variety of precious metals and valuable minerals are also found across the region, from copper to diamonds and bauxite (used to make aluminium). These resources should have been the foundation for booming economies in Africa, enabling investment in roads, railways, telecommunications and other growth promoting infrastructure.
That they have not been can be explained by the actions of Africa's leaders. With the obvious exception of the universally revered Nelson Mandela, African politicians have poor reputations when it comes to delivering transparent and accountable government. A 2009 survey of citizens' perceptions of corruption in their countries, by the NGO Transparency International (TI), places ten African countries amongst the worst twenty in the world.
Indeed many African governments have sought to gain personal profit from their countries' resources, using state-owned companies with monopoly access to natural resources to control national wealth for their own benefit. Large-scale domestic and foreign investment has been concentrated in these industries, providing high returns for those in power and excluding most citizens. Agriculture, "the backbone of overall growth for the majority of countries in the region" according to the FAO, has not benefitted from similar attention because in this sector the returns are disbursed throughout the population and harder for those in power to capture. The FAO estimates that 75% of the total land suitable for cultivation in Sub-Saharan Africa, which could provide incomes for many millions of poor and middle-income Africans, has yet to be farmed because of a lack of investment.
At the same time governments throughout the region have overseen the expansion of petty corruption throughout the societies they govern. TI's 2007 Country Study Report for Cameroon argues that corruption "affects public contracts, insurance companies, customs and taxes, the army and police, justice, electoral processes and more". Less than 50% of those the NGO surveyed in Senegal in 2009 said they had not paid a bribe of any amount in the last twelve months. When this pervasive the demand for bribes is a hindrance to productive economic activity, freezing out entrepreneurs who cannot afford to pay and putting off many would be small-scale investors.
Western governments have criticised their African counterparts for the corruption that has undermined economies in the Sub-Saharan region. They have emphasised the need for African leaders to promote "good governance"; more effective and inclusive government that is transparent and accountable. However, as TI point out in regard to Cameroon, "it is at the level of the central administration, which should in fact be implementing good governance, that the plague of corruption is the most widespread".
This is bad news for Suzanne. Unlike many others in her position she has no intention to settle permanently outside Africa. Instead she is planning to return to Cameroon and set up a business helping local companies to prosper. "People come to Europe with the idea of settling and not going back. They do not think maybe if [I was] investing in Africa my younger brothers and sisters would not have to encounter the same difficulty I have, because if I go back and invest I am creating jobs". It remains to be seen, in light of the problem of corruption big and small, whether she herself will prosper once she returns. It will not be easy unless the government starts to change its practices and sets a different example for society to follow.
