Dakar, Senegal — After training as a nurse, Nevielle Leinyuy spent almost a decade in Cameroon working as a receptionist because she couldn’t find a decent-paying job in the medical field. Last year, he gave up looking. He enrolled in a nursing program in Canada, where he now lives with his wife and children.
“They are stealing us from Cameroon,” said Leinyuy, 39. “We want to work in Cameroon but there is no pay, so we have to look for other options.”
Cameroon has one of the world’s lowest ratios of healthcare professionals per capita. About a third of medical graduates who graduated from medical school last year left the country, said Higher Education Minister Jacques Fame Ndongo.
Many doctors and nurses are leaving the West African country in search of more lucrative jobs in Europe and North America. Canada, like Cameroon, has English and French as its official languages.
Leinyuy said he would have earned 60,000 CFA francs, or less than $100 a month, working as a nurse in Cameroon.
“Imagine what a family of a father with three children and a wife would do with this,” he said. “The rent for my house alone was 40,000 francs ($66).”
Cameroon is not the only sub-Saharan African country where low wages are driving healthcare professionals to leave the country.
Although the number of healthcare professionals has increased following the COVID pandemic in several countries, almost 75% of African countries still face shortages of medical personnel and high rates of healthcare professionals leaving to work abroad, according to a report from 2023 of the World Health Organization.
A shortage of health workers makes it increasingly difficult to combat child mortality and infectious diseases and provide essential services such as vaccinations, said WHO Regional Director for Africa Matshidiso Moeti.
Cameroon has fewer than seven nurses per 10,000 inhabitants, according to the latest WHO data. Neighboring Nigeria has more than twice that proportion and Canada has more than 14 times.
Marie-Pier Burelle, a spokesperson for Health Canada, told the Associated Press that Canada is facing its own health care workforce shortage. More than 30,000 nursing positions in the country are unfilled, according to Statistics Canada.
Burelle said Canada follows the WHO code of practice to ensure recruiting workers internationally is ethical. Ethical recruitment includes strengthening health systems in developing countries dealing with medical staff shortages, in line with the WHO code of practice.
Late last year, the Canadian government donated about $2.2 million to Cameroon’s health ministry and delivered medical and monitoring equipment as part of Canada’s Global Vaccine Equity Initiative.
But this investment falls far short of needs.
The Cameroon government employs about 100 doctors a year for a population of about 28 million people, said Dr. Peter Louis Ndifor, vice president of the Medical Council of Cameroon, an association of doctors. He said the numbers are even lower in the private sector.
By comparison, the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, with a population of less than a million people, recruited about 155 doctors last year, according to provincial health authorities.
As the director of a private medical clinic, Ndifor said he has experienced first-hand the problem of healthcare workers leaving Cameroon.
“Personally, I will not stop any young person who thinks their future is to travel abroad,” said Ndifor. “But when a young doctor who you supervised for three to five years and gave you responsibility for leaves, it becomes a huge setback.”
The shortage of health professionals is just part of the current health crisis in Cameroon.
More than 210 health units no longer function due to destruction or abandonment by health personnel during a separatist conflict in the west of the country, according to the United Nations. The conflict has killed thousands of people in recent years.
Cameroon’s Ministry of Health did not respond to questions about the high number of health professionals leaving the country.
Tumenta Kennedy, a migration consultant based in Cameroon, said Canada has become an attractive destination because Canadian agencies specifically target local doctors and nurses. Family ties abroad also play a role.
Canadian government immigration programs, such as the Federal Skilled Worker Program or Express Entry, are increasingly active. Cameroonians are among the top nationalities applying for Express Entry, according to the program’s latest report.
Overall, in 2021, more than 1,800 new permanent residents came to Canada to work as registered nurses from other nations.
Inès Kingue, 30, a medical laboratory technician from Douala, hopes to join them. Despite having two master’s degrees in virology and microbiology, she has worked as an intern without a contract for four years, earning less than US$200 a month. She heard about training opportunities in Canada from a colleague.
“When Canada opened its doors, I put all my focus on trying to get there,” Kingue said. ___
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