Africa’s healthcare system is in rough condition. Developed countries are making it worse by draining the continent of healthcare professionals. One in every 10 physicians in the United Kingdom comes from Africa.

That Africa has far fewer healthcare professionals per person should hardly need demonstration. Still, the scale of the problem continues to astonish. In Malawi, for example, the physician-to-population ratio is one per 50,000, more than 100 times the figure for the United Kingdom. For sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, the rate is one doctor for every 8,000. Within Africa itself, there are also enormous disparities between city and countryside.

Recent studies have underscored the gravity of the situation. More than 13,000 physicians trained in sub-Saharan Africa now practise in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. It is estimated that one third of graduates from state medical schools in Nigeria migrate to Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States within 10 years of graduation. In the year 2000 alone, according to one study, some 500 nurses left Ghana, double the total of nursing graduates in the country that year.

Professionals can hardly be blamed for seeking a better quality of life for themselves and their families, particularly those who live in regions torn by political strife, high crime and violence. But the migration is being actively encouraged by recruiters, and accepted without responsibility by the healthcare systems of wealthy countries.

Many countries develop mechanisms to induce medical professionals to work in regions where needs are greatest. It takes little imagination to devise such schemes. Can we not envisage something comparable, but on a global scale, whereby a package of incentives and penalties can help to improve the situation?

This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the benchmark for the protection of human dignity. The Declaration recognises both a right to health and a right to benefit from science. And it imposes a duty on everyone to help promote these and other rights.

Today, people readily accept their obligation to protect the environment. We talk of carbon credits and similar mechanisms aimed at discouraging anti-social behaviour in this respect. But we also impose penalties, in the form of higher prices or higher taxes for those who insist on buying automobiles that waste petrol.

So let us do the same with healthcare. Global health is a global responsibility. By draining Africa of its best and brightest, people in the North enhance the quality of their own healthcare, but by damaging that of those who live in the South.

William Schabas is professor of human rights law at the National University of Ireland, Galway and director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights.