Roughly a decade ago, I spent a year in a developing country working on a project to promote human rights. We had a rotating team of about a dozen (mostly) brilliant local employees, all college-educated, working alongside us. We invested a lot of time and money into training these employees, with the expectation that they (as members of the college-educated elite) would help lead human rights reform in the country long after our project disbanded. I got nostalgic and looked up my old colleagues recently. Every single one is living in the West now. A few are still somewhat involved in human rights, but most are notably under-employed (a lawyer washing dishes in a restaurant in Virginia, for example).
I'm torn on this. I'm sure my former colleagues are happier on an individual level. Their human rights are certainly better respected in the West, and the salaries are better. But the potential good that they could have done in their home country is (probably) substantially higher. On my way out, I signed letters of recommendation for each employee, which I later found out were used to pad visa applications. (I am perhaps feeling a bit of guilt over contributing to a developing country's "brain drain" as a result.) After I left, there was a blowup between two of the Western employees over whether to continue supporting emigration. The TL;DR of the disagreement was "It's the nice thing to do, and refusing to support emigration could reduce morale and our ability to hire go-getters" versus "We can't have lasting impact if our ringers keep leaving."
I'm curious about what other EAs have seen in their orgs. Is there any kind of organizational policy that exists on matters like this?
Hey @Larks sorry for the delay. I wanted to touch base with one of my old colleagues to make sure I'm remembering everything correctly from 10+ years ago.
Yes, our plan did have a lot of weight on training key locals that we took on as employees (notably lawyers, but also a journalist and a few other "civil society" figures). I was involved in some of the hiring process, and we were very up front about wanting people who were committed for the long-term.
If we had known that the average person was going to get a visa and leave in a few years, I don't think we would have reduced the training investment, but would have tried to find a way to screen for people who would genuinely stick around. For example, we spent a lot of time stiff-arming a local government official's demands to hire his nephew. (Definitely a bad look for a human rights org to be doing nepotistic favors.) But apparently the official and his nephew are pretty firmly rooted in the country, so maybe it would've been an OK long-term investment? No easy answers I'm afraid.