Context:
Brain drain refers to the phenomenon when educated and skilled people from a developing nation leave their home to build a new life in a developed country. Sri Lanka has already faced this problem before. Nevertheless, following the 2022 economic crisis, the situation escalated to a whole new level. The nation ran short of foreign currency. Long fuel queues were observed. The prices of medicines became very high, and the cost of living shot up overnight. Many professionals, such as doctors, engineers, university lecturers, IT professionals, etc., found it almost impossible to make a decent living back at home. For many, leaving seemed to be the best choice.
The Government Medical Officers’ Association has warned that more than 2,500 doctors and medical specialists have left the country in recent years. According to the Human Flight and Brain Drain Index, Sri Lanka is ranked 20th in the world. The country has a brain drain value of 7.6 index points. Furthermore, it is ranked 9th in South Asia. Although this is quite a worrying statistic, considering Sri Lanka has been investing heavily in public education. Losing doctors, academics, engineers, and technology professionals with such frequency is a serious long-term structural threat to the economy of a nation that is trying hard to revive.
This article analyses why skilled workers are leaving Sri Lanka, which sectors have been hit hardest, and what the government has and has not done in response. It also explores a set of realistic solutions and considers how the current global economic climate is making it increasingly difficult for the country to hold on to its brightest talent.
How Big Is the Problem?
The clearest picture of accelerating brain drain comes from professional licensing bodies. The Sri Lanka Medical Council issues Good Standing Certificates to doctors who want to register and work overseas. The number of such certificates issued jumped more than fivefold between 2019 and 2023. Before the economic crisis hit in 2021, an average of around 200 doctors per year were emigrating. That number surged dramatically as the crisis deepened.
As of 2024, more than 25 percent of government doctors had already taken the examinations required for overseas employment. That is not a trailing indicator of what has happened. It is a leading indicator of what is coming. A similar trend is present among engineers too. In academia, universities are losing their most internationally competitive staff. In technology, the ICTA’s Digital Economy Strategy identifies talent retention as one of the most critical bottlenecks to building the digital economy Sri Lanka aspires to become.
In 2024, a record 312,836 Sri Lankans departed for foreign employment, the highest figure in the country’s history, according to the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment. More significantly, by the first nine months of 2025, the skilled category accounted for 76.5 per cent of all departures for foreign employment, up from 66 per cent in 2022, according to the Central Bank of Sri Lanka’s Quarterly Bulletin on Workers’ Remittances and Labor Migration. Even as total departure numbers have stabilized, the brain drain component of emigration is worsening.
It is worth noting that emigration is not always harmful. Remittances from Sri Lankans abroad remain a lifeline for the economy. However, when professionals leave primarily because of economic hardship and institutional dysfunction rather than personal ambition, it signals something that must be fixed, not simply managed.
Why Are They Leaving?
There is rarely just one thing that explains something. There are many layers. The rupee depreciation, inflation, and loss of purchasing power made domestic salaries feel less for professionals supporting a family. People now prefer to relocate abroad rather than work at home as the problem of fuel, medicine, food, etc., becomes a daily nuisance. A doctor or an engineer can easily earn three to six times more abroad. Although the IMF’s Extended Fund Facility program has improved the macroeconomic situation in Sri Lanka, the salary gap between Sri Lanka and destination countries remains wide.
The structural consequences of this are visible in the labor market. According to the Department of Census and Statistics, Sri Lanka’s Labor Force Participation Rate fell from 52.3 per cent in 2019 to 47.4 per cent in 2024, while the number of working-age Sri Lankans outside the labor force grew by over 1.4 million over the same period. GDP has recovered, but the domestic economy is not retaining enough talent to drive it.
However, it is not all about money, and thinking that way has resulted in wrong policy responses. Younger professionals often complain about the demoralizing effect of working in systems where politics matter and not competence. Sri Lanka’s positions on metrics of institutional integrity have not found favor. Professionals weigh this heavily when deciding whether to commit their careers to public institutions.
The Institute of Policy Studies of Sri Lanka (IPS) has extensively documented this concern. Politicization of public sector appointments and bureaucratic inefficiency are the most frequently cited reasons for emigration.
Working conditions add to the frustration. Public hospital doctors are facing shortages of medical supplies and basic equipment. Insufficient research funding, limited access to international journals and networks, say academics. Sri Lanka’s expenditure on research and development is recorded to be approximately 0.1% of GDP. Software professionals say the domestic market does not offer exposure to cutting-edge projects yet. These are not minor concerns. Professionals will remain unbenefited as they cannot grow, learn, and build careers at home.
The peer effect is also present, according to researchers. As more and more of your colleagues and friends leave, moving abroad loses its stigma. It becomes normalized and even anticipated. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle: the more people leave, the more acceptable it becomes for others to follow. Findings from the 2024 PLOS ONE research on migration dynamics in Sri Lanka confirm that once this cycle is set in place, it is difficult to negate.
Which Sectors Are Worst Affected?
Brain drain does not hit all sectors equally. The table below summarizes the areas of greatest concern.
| Sector | Key Professionals Affected | Main Destinations | Severity |
| Healthcare | Doctors, Nurses, Pharmacists | UK, Australia, UAE, Canada | Critical |
| Higher Education | Academics, Researchers | Australia, UK, USA | High |
| Information Technology | Engineers, Developers, Data Scientists | Australia, Germany, Canada | High |
| Engineering and Infrastructure | Civil, Electrical, Mechanical Engineers | UAE, Saudi Arabia, Australia | Moderate to High |
| Finance and Economics | Economists, Analysts, Accountants | UK, Singapore, UAE | Moderate |
Sources: IPS Sri Lanka; SLMC; SLEC; ICTA Sri Lanka.
Healthcare is perhaps the most severely affected sector to have lost professionals at this scale. Rural areas bear the greatest burden, as they depend almost entirely on the public health system. The Ministry of Health has flagged specialist shortages in anesthesiology, radiology, and specific surgical fields. When a rural hospital loses its only specialist, the patients in that district simply do without.
In higher education, universities losing their most capable academics weakens research output and the quality of postgraduate teaching. This is a compounding problem: today’s brain drain produces tomorrow’s brain drain, because it degrades what Sri Lanka can offer its own next generation of students. In technology, retention of local talent is described as the single biggest obstacle to building a competitive digital economy, because every engineer who leaves takes with them not just skills but networks, ideas, and institutional knowledge that would have built something here.
How Has the Government Responded, and Where Has It Failed?
The honest answer is that the government response has been insufficient, disunited, and lacking in long-term thinking. Despite the scope of the crisis brought to light in 2022, Sri Lanka still does not have a coherent national effort to retain skilled professionals or to attract its diaspora back.
Public sector salaries are low. The Central Bank of Sri Lanka has documented that real wages have not returned to pre-crisis levels. Political meddling in university appointments and public-sector hiring continues to undermine confidence in the system, thereby stalling governance reform. Sri Lanka spends approximately 0.1 percent of its GDP on research and development. It is therefore very difficult for the country to hold on to academics who require research support to remain professionally competitive.
We do not have an institutional architecture comparable to Rwanda’s Diaspora Office or India’s diaspora programme run by the Ministry of External Affairs. Sri Lanka cannot tap into the nearly three million Sri Lankans living abroad, many of whom are highly qualified, without such a structure. As long as Sri Lanka does not adopt a coherent, cross-ministerial retention framework, the outflow will continue.
The Current Global Economy, and Why It Makes Things Harder
Sri Lanka is not an isolated country. The fresh economic headwinds in 2025 and 2026 appear to make it more difficult to retain talent rather than easier. According to the IMF’s latest global outlook, world growth is projected at 3.1 percent in 2026, modest and not evenly shared. Geopolitical tensions and the war in the Middle East, bringing an impact on energy prices, are a fresh inflationary pressure.
According to the G-24 meetings that took place on the sidelines of the IMF-World Bank Spring Meetings in April 2026, Sri Lanka and other small open import-dependent economies have been most at risk of external shocks. With the surge in petroleum prices, the import cost and inflation will increase.
Remittance flows arising from approximately 1.2 million Sri Lankans working in the Middle East could face uncertainty if the Gulf labor markets are affected by regional instability. Despite these risks, remittances reached a record USD 8.07 billion in 2025, a 22.8 per cent increase on 2024 according to the Central Bank of Sri Lanka, showing how central migrant workers have become to the country’s economic stability. US tariff policies are likely to restrict export earnings from the garment and key sectors.
Sri Lanka’s economy grew by 5 per cent in 2024, and by a further 5.0 per cent in 2025, according to provisional estimates from the Department of Census and Statistics, a genuine and welcome recovery. World Bank expected Sri Lanka’s growth to moderate to 3.6 per cent in 2026 before the Iran war started. This could drop down further, as these global headwinds are felt. In this environment, professionals continue to feel the pressure to seek better opportunities abroad. It grows stronger.
What Needs to Be Done
The problem of brain drain should be tackled both in the short, medium, and long term, the most important point being that they should all run in parallel.
Making public sector salaries for healthcare professionals and academics more competitive is the most pressing priority in the short term. It does not require a complete overhaul of the government’s pay structure. Allowing sector-specific retention allowances, vehicle permits, professional development budgets, and subsidized housing can meaningfully help without overburdening the IMF fiscal program. In a parallel manner, the government should develop a registry of diaspora talent, a database that charts Sri Lankans with skills residing overseas, their expertise, and their interest in returning to Sri Lanka or in remotely contributing to Sri Lanka. Rwanda accomplished this affordably and to great effect, building structured diaspora mapping exercises across Belgium, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Canada through its Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
In the medium term, to tackle one of the most common reasons for the departure of professionals, a good starting point would be to depoliticize appointments in universities, public hospitals, and the civil service and replace these with transparent merit-based HR systems. The University Grants Commission must be entrusted with the mandate and power to reform university governance and provide autonomy to institutions in academic and financial matters. A national research fund, even a small one, will send a clear signal that Sri Lanka values knowledge production. When scholars learn that merit will attract funding for research, it alters the equation on staying or leaving.
In the long run, it will have to set up a formal diaspora engagement program. The government must set up an office under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to coordinate return-migration incentives such as tax holidays, fast tracking of professional registration, and public sector job guarantees for returnees. Virtual engagement pathways can connect diaspora members through visiting professorships, advisory panels, and online mentorship programs, even if they are not ready to return yet. The Indian diaspora engagement model and the Balikbayan programme of the Philippines are well-documented cases of how large diasporas have been turned into partners in national development by governments. Sri Lanka should study and adopt these models.
Conclusion
Brain drain is a symptom of something deeper. The issue itself is a governance failure, inadequate and ineffective state compensation, poor working conditions, and institutional dysfunction that makes skilled professionals feel a future at home is not worth waiting for.
Sri Lanka has many strengths to build on. It has an educated population by regional standards. The country has a large diaspora that is globally connected and, in many cases, emotionally invested. The country’s services sector is growing, and its strategic location in the Indian Ocean is a real asset. If Sri Lanka can hold onto enough of its talent at home, or attract enough of it back, to power the adequate number of institutions, hospitals, universities, and industries the country requires, these strengths will translate into sustained development.
The expense of failing to act is no mere abstraction. They are reflected in more prolonged waits in the public hospital, the declining quality of university classrooms, slower growth in the technology sector, and a waning ability to train and inspire the next generation of professionals. The crisis of 2022 exposed a sore. Global pressures in the years 2025 and 2026 threaten to deepen it.
There is an opportunity for action. However, Sri Lanka must use it urgently, coherently, and genuinely, to build the kind of country that its best people want to call home.
Context:
Brain drain refers to the phenomenon when educated and skilled people from a developing nation leave their home to build a new life in a developed country. Sri Lanka has already faced this problem before. Nevertheless, following the 2022 economic crisis, the situation escalated to a whole new level. The nation ran short of foreign currency. Long fuel queues were observed. The prices of medicines became very high, and the cost of living shot up overnight. Many professionals, such as doctors, engineers, university lecturers, IT professionals, etc., found it almost impossible to make a decent living back at home. For many, leaving seemed to be the best choice.
The Government Medical Officers’ Association has warned that more than 2,500 doctors and medical specialists have left the country in recent years. According to the Human Flight and Brain Drain Index, Sri Lanka is ranked 20th in the world. The country has a brain drain value of 7.6 index points. Furthermore, it is ranked 9th in South Asia. Although this is quite a worrying statistic, considering Sri Lanka has been investing heavily in public education. Losing doctors, academics, engineers, and technology professionals with such frequency is a serious long-term structural threat to the economy of a nation that is trying hard to revive.
This article analyses why skilled workers are leaving Sri Lanka, which sectors have been hit hardest, and what the government has and has not done in response. It also explores a set of realistic solutions and considers how the current global economic climate is making it increasingly difficult for the country to hold on to its brightest talent.
How Big Is the Problem?
The clearest picture of accelerating brain drain comes from professional licensing bodies. The Sri Lanka Medical Council issues Good Standing Certificates to doctors who want to register and work overseas. The number of such certificates issued jumped more than fivefold between 2019 and 2023. Before the economic crisis hit in 2021, an average of around 200 doctors per year were emigrating. That number surged dramatically as the crisis deepened.
As of 2024, more than 25 percent of government doctors had already taken the examinations required for overseas employment. That is not a trailing indicator of what has happened. It is a leading indicator of what is coming. A similar trend is present among engineers too. In academia, universities are losing their most internationally competitive staff. In technology, the ICTA’s Digital Economy Strategy identifies talent retention as one of the most critical bottlenecks to building the digital economy Sri Lanka aspires to become.
In 2024, a record 312,836 Sri Lankans departed for foreign employment, the highest figure in the country’s history, according to the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment. More significantly, by the first nine months of 2025, the skilled category accounted for 76.5 per cent of all departures for foreign employment, up from 66 per cent in 2022, according to the Central Bank of Sri Lanka’s Quarterly Bulletin on Workers’ Remittances and Labor Migration. Even as total departure numbers have stabilized, the brain drain component of emigration is worsening.
It is worth noting that emigration is not always harmful. Remittances from Sri Lankans abroad remain a lifeline for the economy. However, when professionals leave primarily because of economic hardship and institutional dysfunction rather than personal ambition, it signals something that must be fixed, not simply managed.
Why Are They Leaving?
There is rarely just one thing that explains something. There are many layers. The rupee depreciation, inflation, and loss of purchasing power made domestic salaries feel less for professionals supporting a family. People now prefer to relocate abroad rather than work at home as the problem of fuel, medicine, food, etc., becomes a daily nuisance. A doctor or an engineer can easily earn three to six times more abroad. Although the IMF’s Extended Fund Facility program has improved the macroeconomic situation in Sri Lanka, the salary gap between Sri Lanka and destination countries remains wide.
The structural consequences of this are visible in the labor market. According to the Department of Census and Statistics, Sri Lanka’s Labor Force Participation Rate fell from 52.3 per cent in 2019 to 47.4 per cent in 2024, while the number of working-age Sri Lankans outside the labor force grew by over 1.4 million over the same period. GDP has recovered, but the domestic economy is not retaining enough talent to drive it.
However, it is not all about money, and thinking that way has resulted in wrong policy responses. Younger professionals often complain about the demoralizing effect of working in systems where politics matter and not competence. Sri Lanka’s positions on metrics of institutional integrity have not found favor. Professionals weigh this heavily when deciding whether to commit their careers to public institutions.
The Institute of Policy Studies of Sri Lanka (IPS) has extensively documented this concern. Politicization of public sector appointments and bureaucratic inefficiency are the most frequently cited reasons for emigration.
Working conditions add to the frustration. Public hospital doctors are facing shortages of medical supplies and basic equipment. Insufficient research funding, limited access to international journals and networks, say academics. Sri Lanka’s expenditure on research and development is recorded to be approximately 0.1% of GDP. Software professionals say the domestic market does not offer exposure to cutting-edge projects yet. These are not minor concerns. Professionals will remain unbenefited as they cannot grow, learn, and build careers at home.
The peer effect is also present, according to researchers. As more and more of your colleagues and friends leave, moving abroad loses its stigma. It becomes normalized and even anticipated. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle: the more people leave, the more acceptable it becomes for others to follow. Findings from the 2024 PLOS ONE research on migration dynamics in Sri Lanka confirm that once this cycle is set in place, it is difficult to negate.
Which Sectors Are Worst Affected?
Brain drain does not hit all sectors equally. The table below summarizes the areas of greatest concern.
| Sector | Key Professionals Affected | Main Destinations | Severity |
| Healthcare | Doctors, Nurses, Pharmacists | UK, Australia, UAE, Canada | Critical |
| Higher Education | Academics, Researchers | Australia, UK, USA | High |
| Information Technology | Engineers, Developers, Data Scientists | Australia, Germany, Canada | High |
| Engineering and Infrastructure | Civil, Electrical, Mechanical Engineers | UAE, Saudi Arabia, Australia | Moderate to High |
| Finance and Economics | Economists, Analysts, Accountants | UK, Singapore, UAE | Moderate |
Sources: IPS Sri Lanka; SLMC; SLEC; ICTA Sri Lanka.
Healthcare is perhaps the most severely affected sector to have lost professionals at this scale. Rural areas bear the greatest burden, as they depend almost entirely on the public health system. The Ministry of Health has flagged specialist shortages in anesthesiology, radiology, and specific surgical fields. When a rural hospital loses its only specialist, the patients in that district simply do without.
In higher education, universities losing their most capable academics weakens research output and the quality of postgraduate teaching. This is a compounding problem: today’s brain drain produces tomorrow’s brain drain, because it degrades what Sri Lanka can offer its own next generation of students. In technology, retention of local talent is described as the single biggest obstacle to building a competitive digital economy, because every engineer who leaves takes with them not just skills but networks, ideas, and institutional knowledge that would have built something here.
How Has the Government Responded, and Where Has It Failed?
The honest answer is that the government response has been insufficient, disunited, and lacking in long-term thinking. Despite the scope of the crisis brought to light in 2022, Sri Lanka still does not have a coherent national effort to retain skilled professionals or to attract its diaspora back.
Public sector salaries are low. The Central Bank of Sri Lanka has documented that real wages have not returned to pre-crisis levels. Political meddling in university appointments and public-sector hiring continues to undermine confidence in the system, thereby stalling governance reform. Sri Lanka spends approximately 0.1 percent of its GDP on research and development. It is therefore very difficult for the country to hold on to academics who require research support to remain professionally competitive.
We do not have an institutional architecture comparable to Rwanda’s Diaspora Office or India’s diaspora programme run by the Ministry of External Affairs. Sri Lanka cannot tap into the nearly three million Sri Lankans living abroad, many of whom are highly qualified, without such a structure. As long as Sri Lanka does not adopt a coherent, cross-ministerial retention framework, the outflow will continue.
The Current Global Economy, and Why It Makes Things Harder
Sri Lanka is not an isolated country. The fresh economic headwinds in 2025 and 2026 appear to make it more difficult to retain talent rather than easier. According to the IMF’s latest global outlook, world growth is projected at 3.1 percent in 2026, modest and not evenly shared. Geopolitical tensions and the war in the Middle East, bringing an impact on energy prices, are a fresh inflationary pressure.
According to the G-24 meetings that took place on the sidelines of the IMF-World Bank Spring Meetings in April 2026, Sri Lanka and other small open import-dependent economies have been most at risk of external shocks. With the surge in petroleum prices, the import cost and inflation will increase.
Remittance flows arising from approximately 1.2 million Sri Lankans working in the Middle East could face uncertainty if the Gulf labor markets are affected by regional instability. Despite these risks, remittances reached a record USD 8.07 billion in 2025, a 22.8 per cent increase on 2024 according to the Central Bank of Sri Lanka, showing how central migrant workers have become to the country’s economic stability. US tariff policies are likely to restrict export earnings from the garment and key sectors.
Sri Lanka’s economy grew by 5 per cent in 2024, and by a further 5.0 per cent in 2025, according to provisional estimates from the Department of Census and Statistics, a genuine and welcome recovery. World Bank expected Sri Lanka’s growth to moderate to 3.6 per cent in 2026 before the Iran war started. This could drop down further, as these global headwinds are felt. In this environment, professionals continue to feel the pressure to seek better opportunities abroad. It grows stronger.
What Needs to Be Done
The problem of brain drain should be tackled both in the short, medium, and long term, the most important point being that they should all run in parallel.
Making public sector salaries for healthcare professionals and academics more competitive is the most pressing priority in the short term. It does not require a complete overhaul of the government’s pay structure. Allowing sector-specific retention allowances, vehicle permits, professional development budgets, and subsidized housing can meaningfully help without overburdening the IMF fiscal program. In a parallel manner, the government should develop a registry of diaspora talent, a database that charts Sri Lankans with skills residing overseas, their expertise, and their interest in returning to Sri Lanka or in remotely contributing to Sri Lanka. Rwanda accomplished this affordably and to great effect, building structured diaspora mapping exercises across Belgium, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Canada through its Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
In the medium term, to tackle one of the most common reasons for the departure of professionals, a good starting point would be to depoliticize appointments in universities, public hospitals, and the civil service and replace these with transparent merit-based HR systems. The University Grants Commission must be entrusted with the mandate and power to reform university governance and provide autonomy to institutions in academic and financial matters. A national research fund, even a small one, will send a clear signal that Sri Lanka values knowledge production. When scholars learn that merit will attract funding for research, it alters the equation on staying or leaving.
In the long run, it will have to set up a formal diaspora engagement program. The government must set up an office under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to coordinate return-migration incentives such as tax holidays, fast tracking of professional registration, and public sector job guarantees for returnees. Virtual engagement pathways can connect diaspora members through visiting professorships, advisory panels, and online mentorship programs, even if they are not ready to return yet. The Indian diaspora engagement model and the Balikbayan programme of the Philippines are well-documented cases of how large diasporas have been turned into partners in national development by governments. Sri Lanka should study and adopt these models.
Conclusion
Brain drain is a symptom of something deeper. The issue itself is a governance failure, inadequate and ineffective state compensation, poor working conditions, and institutional dysfunction that makes skilled professionals feel a future at home is not worth waiting for.
Sri Lanka has many strengths to build on. It has an educated population by regional standards. The country has a large diaspora that is globally connected and, in many cases, emotionally invested. The country’s services sector is growing, and its strategic location in the Indian Ocean is a real asset. If Sri Lanka can hold onto enough of its talent at home, or attract enough of it back, to power the adequate number of institutions, hospitals, universities, and industries the country requires, these strengths will translate into sustained development.
The expense of failing to act is no mere abstraction. They are reflected in more prolonged waits in the public hospital, the declining quality of university classrooms, slower growth in the technology sector, and a waning ability to train and inspire the next generation of professionals. The crisis of 2022 exposed a sore. Global pressures in the years 2025 and 2026 threaten to deepen it.
There is an opportunity for action. However, Sri Lanka must use it urgently, coherently, and genuinely, to build the kind of country that its best people want to call home.
Prasanna Perera is a Senior Professor in Economics and the Head of the Department of Economics and Statistics, University of Peradeniya.
Factum is an Asia-Pacific-focused think tank on International Relations, Tech Cooperation, and Strategic Communications accessible via www.factum.lk.
The views expressed here are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the organization’s
