Western approaches to personnel training in Africa have become a form of neocolonialism, while Russia is not going to "siphon off the brains of African countries", said Oleg Ozerov, Ambassador-at-Large of the Russian Foreign Ministry and Head of the Secretariat of the Russia-Africa Partnership Forum.
"What is happening is what is called 'brain drain', and in other words, it is another form of neo-colonialism, exploitation of Africa, which has been going on for centuries through the slave trade and the pumping out of resources, and now it has turned into "brain drain" and taking the best people out of Africa," he said.
His remarks came during a round table in the format of a video bridge Moscow - Kinshasa - Tunisia - Douala - Bamako on the theme: "Russia-Africa: Media Cooperation and Media Sovereignty", organized by the Rossiya Segodnya Media Group.
Ozerov noted that unlike the West, Russia "does not need to pump brains out of African countries."
"On the contrary, it [Russia] is interested in training highly qualified personnel, including in those areas that the African Union needs most," he added.
According to the Russian diplomat, while developing educational programs in Africa, the West does not focus on training specialists in the field of natural and scientific disciplines necessary for the industrialization of the continent.
"If we look at the structure of personnel trained by Western countries, we see that there are disastrously few specialists in the natural science disciplines: physics, chemistry, biology, and when they are trained, these specialists often stay in the West," he said.