A New Database of Health Professional Emigration from Africa

The migration of doctors and nurses from Africa to rich countries has raised fears of an African medical brain drain. But empirical research on the issue has been hampered by lack of data. How many doctors and nurses have left Africa? Which countries did they leave? Where have they settled? To answer these questions we have compiled a dataset of the cumulative bilateral net flows of African-born physicians and nurses to the nine most important destination countries. It is the first dataset of bilateral migration flows specific to a skilled profession collected systematically for a large number of developing countries. This note makes the data available to the research community