Zimbabwe To Export Nurses

So Zimbabwe trained a whole bunch of nurses – and continues to do so – but can’t pay them. What is the next thing? The government will start exporting nurses.

Yes, this idea comes courtesy of the Nursing Services department of the Ministry of Health. It says that countries like Lesotho, Trinidad & Tobago and Swaziland said they needed hundreds of nurses to work in their countries.

Of course for the thousands of nurses who have been trained this comes as good news – provided they are released from bond – and they will be particularly excited about moving to places where they will be paid a lot better than they are here.

The downside is that while the health services sector is highly under-serviced we are training people to go and save people in other countries. The biggest beneficiaries of our education system will not mothers of the children who become economic migrants but some other country which simply has the money to pay them.

They say that the world is fair but it is obviously only so for people who have the money.

The good thing about this formal arrangement though – again for those who leave the country – is that where they go, they will be protected by a Government-to-Government agreement which will ensure they are not abused.

That is an upside. We don’t want any Zimbabwean, anywhere in the world, harmed. We are protective like that.