A global diaspora of medical workers now looks toward home

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — The medical supplies had been shipped. The planning began a year in advance. Then the coronavirus arrived, and Dr. Charmaine Emelife’s heart sank.

The annual trip to Nigeria to provide free medical care — the flagship project of the Association of Nigerian Physicians in the Americas — had been set to start Sunday but can't go on. Now the 4,000-member organization, like diaspora medical groups around the world, is scrambling for other ways to help back home, where it might be more needed than ever before.

A global “brain drain” of medical professionals to richer countries has left developing nations in Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America and elsewhere without tens of thousands of highly skilled workers. Some 30% of doctors in the U.S., and one-third of those in the UK, were foreign-born as of 2016, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

At the same time, sub-Saharan Africa has a painful shortage of medical professionals, with access to just 3% of the world’s health workers, according to the World Health Organization. Nigeria has four doctors per 10,000 people. Kenya has just two.

But even as some doctors, nurses and others overseas yearn to return to help with the coronavirus crisis, they face travel restrictions that have slammed shut borders and closed international airports.

“There are said to be no commercial passenger flights going into Nigeria from the U.S., and the U.S. is not receiving the same flights,” Emelife, the Nigerian association’s president, told The Associated Press. “The issue of going back to Nigeria at this point to help is not a conversation.”

Instead, the association is raising money to buy and ship protective equipment for front-line workers, reaching far beyond its...