Global Skill Partnerships trained extra workers so emigration funds home capacity

Skilled labor migration is normally framed as zero-sum: a destination country facing a shortage -- nurses, ICT workers, construction tradespeople -- wants trained migrants, but training those people in the origin country pulls exactly the skilled workers that economy needs most, the textbook 'brain drain' problem. Origin-country governments, wary of subsidizing an exodus of their own best-trained citizens, often resist or slow-walk skilled-emigration training schemes, even when a destination country is willing to help fund the training.

Economist Michael Clemens, in a 2015 World Bank policy proposal, argued the standard responses -- restrict emigration, or simply accept the drain as the cost of training subsidies from abroad -- both left real gains unclaimed. What was missing was a training design that didn't assume every graduate had to either stay or leave for the whole program to make sense.

Split every cohort into an away track funded by the destination country and a home track cross-subsidized by it, so emigration finances extra trained capacity at home.

Destination funding for away track cross-subsidizes home track training

Shared curriculum and instructors make dual-track cheaper than separate programs

Origin country gains skilled workers it wouldn't have trained without destination funding

Design converts one-way extraction into jointly funded capacity expansion

When you train people who may leave, train more than you need and split cohorts into stay/leave tracks from the start, so departures fund extra capacity instead of draining it.

The design was piloted as PALIM (Pilot Project Addressing Labour Shortages through Innovative Labour Migration) between Belgium's Flanders region and Morocco starting in 2019, training around 120 unemployed Moroccan college graduates in ICT and soft skills for shortage industries in both countries, run by Belgium's development agency Enabel with Morocco's national employment agency ANAPEC.