The Forgotten Migration

Why developing countries need foreign expertise in education

When people discuss migration between the developing and developed world, the conversation almost always flows in one direction—the movement of skilled workers, students, and economic migrants from poorer nations toward wealthier ones. Brain drain, remittances, and the loss of human capital from developing countries dominate the discourse. Yet there is a more consequential migration that receives almost no attention: the movement of expertise, educators, and organizational knowledge from developed to developing countries. This reverse flow of human capital may matter more for long-run development than anything else, and the evidence from education systems across the developing world suggests that neglecting it has been catastrophic.

Japan’s transformation into a modern industrial power in the late nineteenth century offers the most instructive case study in development history, and it is one that developing countries have largely failed to learn from. Japan did not merely import Western machinery and patents; it imported Western educators, organizational patterns, administrative structures, and institutional designs. Japanese leaders traveled to Europe and North America to study universities, bureaucracies, and technical schools, and then brought Western experts back to Japan to train the next generation of Japanese professionals. Technology transfer was never assumed to happen automatically through trade or osmosis; it was actively engineered through the deliberate importation of foreign human capital.

What is rarely discussed in development circles is how influential foreign educators once were in building the foundations of human capital in what are now developing countries. However, scholars have begun to document this systematically. Research by Nathan Nunn and Rossella Calvi, among others, has traced the measurable, long-run improvements in literacy, numeracy, health outcomes, and social trust that Christian missions generated in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere. Missionaries were, in effect, the foreign educators of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and their impact on human capital formation was substantial and lasting. The implication is uncomfortable but important: external agents of education can produce generational improvements in skills that domestic systems, left under-organized, fail to deliver.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, newly independent nations across the developing world made a decisive turn away from foreign expertise. Countries including Jamaica, Trinidad, and Nigeria implemented localization policies to increase the representation of native professionals in education, the civil service, and the private sector with local citizens. The impulse behind these policies was entirely understandable. After decades of colonial rule, there was a powerful and legitimate desire to assert ownership over national institutions, to cultivate local talent, and to end dependence on expatriate professionals who had sometimes treated their host societies with condescension or indifference.

Nothing is inherently wrong with encouraging locals to take ownership of their businesses, schools, and public institutions. A nation’s citizens should, over time, occupy every level of its professional life. The problem was one of sequencing and strategy. Localization was pursued as an end in itself rather than as a destination to be reached after a deliberate period of knowledge transfer. Instead of following the Japanese approach, using sustained engagement with foreign experts to build domestic capability before reducing dependence, some developing countries expelled or discouraged foreign expertise before the institutional and pedagogical infrastructure required to replace it was firmly in place. The result was not national empowerment but institutional hollowing. Foreign engineers, educators, doctors, and administrators left or were pushed out, and the systems they had helped sustain began to degrade. In many cases, the degradation was not immediately visible because the institutions they left behind continued to function on inertia. It was only over the following decades, as successive cohorts of students passed through schools that were producing progressively less learning, that the full cost became apparent.

The consequences for education have been severe and well-documented. Despite substantial increases in school enrollment and public spending on education since independence, the quality of schooling across the developing world has not improved. In many countries, it has deteriorated sharply, sometimes to a degree that borders on being scandalous. The scale of this learning crisis is captured with precision in the research literature. Global assessments reveal that in Sub-Saharan Africa, 94.1 percent of fifteen-year-olds are not reaching basic skills in mathematics and science, and crucially, even among the one third of that age group who are actually enrolled in school, nearly 90 percent fail to reach those thresholds. The problem, in other words, is not primarily one of access anymore. It is a problem of learning.

The long-run trend is even more troubling. Survey-based literacy data collected across 87 developing countries, tracking birth cohorts from the 1950s through to the late 1990s, reveals that education quality, measured as the likelihood that a person who completed five years of schooling can actually read, has been falling for decades. Across the developing world, the probability that a woman with five years of schooling could read a sentence fell by roughly two to four percentage points every decade over this period. In Sub-Saharan Africa the decline in education quality between the 1960s and 1990s cohorts was approximately 25 percentage points for both men and women, a stunning regression given that enrollment was rising throughout the same period. East Asia showed relative stability in education quality over the same period, which is significant because it demonstrates that the deterioration seen elsewhere was not inevitable. Countries in this region managed to expand access without destroying the quality of what was being delivered inside classrooms. However, the contrast with South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa is stark and demands explanation.

During the colonial era in India, British administrators established institutions of higher learning that would prove enormously consequential for the country’s intellectual development. University of Calcutta, the University of Bombay, and a range of other colleges and technical schools were built with the explicit purpose of transmitting functional skills to a local population. Crucially, colonial education also placed considerable emphasis on propositional knowledge, which refers to theoretical or declarative knowledge about why things work the way they do, the underlying principles and causal relationships that allow a person not merely to perform a task but to understand it, adapt it, and improve upon it. India has undeniably built scholastic institutions since independence. But rather than building confidently and strategically on the institutional legacy that colonialism left behind, the post-independence government became preoccupied with nationalist rhetoric that framed foreign influence as inherently suspect, especially in the 1960s. The wiser course would have been to treat that legacy as a foundation, actively recruiting foreign experts, deepening partnerships with international universities, and using external expertise to accelerate the development of domestic capability in the way that Singapore and South Korea did. Pride in national identity and the pragmatic importation of foreign knowledge are not in conflict. India’s failure to pursue both simultaneously cost its education system dearly.

Invariably, India represents one of the most dramatic individual cases of deterioration in education quality. A child born in 1958 who attended five years of schooling had roughly a 90.7 percent probability of being able to read as an adult. A child born in 1995 who attended exactly the same five years of schooling had only a 53.8 percent chance of being literate, a collapse of nearly 37 percentage points across four decades. This is not a story of a country that never knew how to educate its children. India demonstrably produced high levels of literacy among those who completed primary school in the 1960s, which means the knowledge and capacity to do so existed. What changed was not the technical understanding of how to teach reading but the institutional environment within which teachers were operating, the incentive structures, the accountability relationships, and the degree to which the entire system was oriented around producing actual learning rather than simply processing children through grades. On standard measures of school inputs, including teacher qualifications, class sizes, and expenditure per pupil, India was doing better in the 1990s than in the 1960s. The inputs improved while the outputs collapsed, which is precisely what one would expect from a system that lost its sense of purpose and its connection to external standards and expertise.

Furthermore, the deterioration in many countries predates the major waves of fee abolition and rapid enrollment expansion, ruling out the simple explanation that quality fell because too many children entered the system at once. In India, for example, the decline in learning outcomes among those who completed primary school was already underway in cohorts born in the 1960s, long before the most dramatic enrollment surges of the 1990s and 2000s.

Nigeria and Ghana illustrate a similar trajectory, and comparing them reveals how different starting points can converge toward the same catastrophic outcome. In Nigeria, 61.9 percent of those in the mid-1950s birth cohort who completed five years of school could read as adults. By the late 1990s, that figure had fallen to 26.2 percent, a collapse of more than 35 percentage points. Nigeria had once built a functioning, relatively effective primary education system, and then allowed it to deteriorate beyond recognition over the course of a generation. Ghana’s story is different in character but equally troubling in outcome. Ghana never achieved the higher baseline that Nigeria once had, with literacy conditional on five years of schooling remaining persistently low, around 18 to 19 percent based on recent assessments, thereby placing it among the worst-performing countries in the world by this measure.

Some observers could use the contrasting examples of Ghana and Nigeria to argue that colonial authorities underinvested in Ghana and attribute Nigeria’s relative success to missionary education. However, this explanation falls short, as it fails to account for Ghana’s lower performance, particularly given that colonial officials there invested in public education, adult literacy and presided over significant schooling reforms. The more compelling explanation lies in what happened after independence. Ghana’s educational trajectory was derailed by mounting economic difficulties that severely constrained funding for the sector. Compounding this, education became increasingly politicized and enlisted for ideological purposes, producing repeated discontinuities in reform efforts that prevented any coherent, sustained improvement from taking hold.

Interestingly, Ghana’s experience has been examined in granular detail using nationally representative household survey data collected in 2006 and 2017. Despite the implementation of a free compulsory basic education program in 1994, and despite the gross primary enrollment rate rising from around 92 percent to 99 percent over the survey period, literacy and numeracy skills for people at the same level of education fell sharply. The decline in literacy was most pronounced among those with upper primary education, where the probability of being able to read a short sentence dropped by approximately 14 percentage points lower in 2017 than in 2006. For numeracy, the declines were even larger, with those at the lower primary level seeing a fall of roughly 26 percentage points in their probability of answering a basic written calculation correctly. More schooling was producing less learning, and this was happening not in a country that was neglecting education but in one that had made access to basic schooling a national priority for thirty years.

These patterns are not easily explained away by compositional changes in who was attending school. The expansion of enrollment did bring more disadvantaged children into classrooms, which could in principle depress average measured outcomes. But the evidence shows that students in later decades were actually healthier and better nourished than their predecessors, as proxied by adult height data, suggesting the raw human capital entering schools was not worse. The decline in education quality appears to be a genuine deterioration in what schools are doing, not merely a statistical artifact of who is attending them.

The problem is further compounded by what researchers describe as the thinness of whatever learning does occur. Even students who pass examinations and progress through the system frequently lack conceptual understanding of the material they have nominally mastered. Studies in rural India found that a significant proportion of students enrolled in tertiary education could not correctly measure the length of a pencil when it was not aligned at zero on a ruler, despite being able to answer standard measurement questions when the task was presented in the familiar textbook format. Only 54.4 percent of rural youth who had completed secondary education and were enrolled in undergraduate programs could correctly calculate a simple elapsed time problem. The learning that exists is rote and brittle, collapsing the moment it is required to be applied in any context that departs from the exact form in which it was taught. This quality of learning cannot sustain economic development or prepare young people for a competitive labor market.

The divergence in outcomes between countries that pursued foreign expertise and those that retreated into nationalist self-sufficiency is perhaps best illustrated by comparing two leaders whose careers overlapped in time but whose philosophies could hardly have been more different. Lee Kuan Yew, the founding Prime Minister of Singapore, traveled extensively to England, the United States, Israel, and other developed nations specifically to study their educational institutions, technological systems, and economic organization.

He was not touring for inspiration; he was conducting reconnaissance with the intention of importing what worked. Singapore actively partnered with foreign universities, recruited overseas talent, and used international expertise as a lever to upgrade domestic human capital. The government has invested in relationships with institutions like MIT, INSEAD, and various American research universities, not merely to send Singaporean students abroad but to bring foreign faculty and research capability into Singapore itself, building domestic institutions that could eventually stand on their own. The results are well known. Singapore went from a city with few natural resources and a poorly educated population to one of the highest-performing education systems on earth within a generation, with its fifteen-year-olds consistently ranking among the top performers globally in mathematics, science, and reading.

Michael Manley of Jamaica, by contrast, embodied a different and far more common tendency in the developing world during the same period. His political project emphasized Black pride, the historical importance of slave rebellions, anti-imperialism, and the assertion of cultural autonomy against Western influence. Manley’s framework, in its emphasis on identity and historical grievance over the patient acquisition of technical capacity and institutional knowledge, offered little that could build a school system, train a teacher, or improve a child’s chances of becoming literate. Jamaica under Manley pursued a form of ideological self-sufficiency that left its institutions without the external expertise and standards that might have arrested their decline. Manley was, unfortunately, the norm. Across the developing world, leaders who should have been asking how to use foreign expertise to rebuild education systems were instead asking how to demonstrate independence from foreign influence. The rhetoric was empowering; the outcomes were not.

The choice between these two orientations is not a choice between dignity and submission. Japan retained its culture, its language, and its sovereignty while importing Western expertise on a massive scale. Singapore did the same, building one of the most distinctively Singaporean societies on earth while remaining intensely outward-looking in its approach to knowledge acquisition. Vietnam offers a more recent and equally instructive example. Survey data shows that the proportion of Vietnamese women who completed five years of schooling and could read as adults increased from around 72 percent to 94 percent across successive birth cohorts, even as overall enrollment expanded.

Vietnam achieved this while remaining a low-income country with relatively modest per-pupil expenditure, which rules out the explanation that money alone drives quality. The distinguishing feature of Vietnam’s success is not superior inputs in the conventional sense but a deep, society-wide commitment to learning outcomes, the kind of institutional purpose that in earlier generations was partly sustained and transmitted by foreign educators and technical advisers. Peru similarly managed to improve the literacy of those completing grade-five from around 69 percent to 85 percent across cohorts born between 1952 and 1992, even as overall enrollment expanded dramatically, demonstrating that the trade-off between access and quality is not a law of nature but a consequence of policy choices.

These findings show that the existing approach, spending more on education within systems that are structurally misaligned with the goal of producing learning, is not working. Across developing countries, the evidence points consistently to a learning crisis that more money alone will not solve. What is needed is a fundamental reorientation of education systems around the actual goal of producing measurable learning outcomes, beginning with foundational literacy and numeracy in the early primary years

Foreign expertise has a critical role to play in that reorientation, not as a permanent substitute for local teachers and administrators, but as a vehicle for transmitting pedagogical knowledge, curricular design, assessment methodology, and organizational practice. The alternative, continuing to expand enrollment while ignoring the collapse of learning quality within those expanded systems, will produce generations of young people who have attended school without becoming educated.