Libya Faces Brain Drain as Young Professionals Flee Decades After Revolution

Young professionals want to leave Libya. Fifteen years after the fall of Tripoli in August 2011, a significant number are planning departure as others have already gone.

Sarah Mizran, a 32-year-old architect, was just a teenager when opposition fighters swept into the capital and ended the rule of Muammar Gaddafi. The dictator had held power for 42 years until he was captured and killed near Sirte.

Mizran left the city for the United Kingdom eight years ago. "Libya loses more than just skills when young professionals leave," she told Al Jazeera. "It loses a sense of possibility when an entire generation grows up feeling that they have to leave in order to build a future, and that leads to a loss of hope in the country itself."

For Mizran, the conflict sparked a departure that is still unfolding today. She was already interested in sustainable architecture before she moved. She pursued a master's degree in southern England. "Leaving was a decision to invest in my own development, rather than a decision to leave (anything) behind," she said. "Due to the situation and the conflicts that were taking place, that made returning to Libya and building a meaningful career even more difficult."

She arrived in the UK at age 24 on a scholarship to study at the University of Kent. "I had to learn a different professional culture, a different way of working, and in many ways just find my place again. But that experience has given me perspective and skills that I would not otherwise have had," she said.

She is far from alone. Nader Elgadi was running his own media company in Tripoli when fighting broke out around the capital's airport in late 2014 during Libya's second civil war. He came to the UK for a master's degree and planned to return home, but mounting threats against activists kept him there instead. "I went from running my own business and living comfortably in Libya to starting my life from scratch in the UK," he said. "The first two years were really hard."

Elgadi founded Libya in the UK in 2018. This cultural charity aims to create the Libya people wanted after they managed to end the dictatorship. The group hosts events for the diaspora community trying to build a sense of that country they always wished for.

Fifteen years on, both describe the UK as home, even though Libya pulls at them strongly. "Home is not something we find once and keep forever," Mizran said. "It's something we create again and again."

Elgadi calls himself a nomad who has stopped expecting to return for good, even while his consultancy still works with Libyan clients.

Whether this dispersal of talent has held Libya back remains up for debate. Tarek Megerisi, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said tens of thousands of very good, technically proficient people are still working in Libya's ministries. He claimed they are blocked from doing their jobs by more senior officials with little interest in governing.

Much of that took root soon after the revolution, he believes. "After the revolution there was a mass return of Libyans from all across the world. Many skilled young professionals, but also older Libyans, whose qualifications and whose experience were often vastly overstated, used their standing to secure political positions and promised to lead the country to democracy.

Instead, they basically just acted like Gaddafi's government did," Megerisi stated. He pointed out that corruption still festers within certain ministries. This rot has pushed away the generation that came of age after 2011. "Young professionals who gained qualifications and had early experience working in the late stage of Gaddafi's Libya, which was a bit more open," were genuinely excited the revolution might catalyse their careers, he said. "All of that kind of just got run into a quagmire."

"It's very sad to see … now all the young generations who have any ambition for their life, they just want to leave the country." Megerisi summed up Libya's fractured governance by paraphrasing Kahlil Gibran's poem Pity the Nation. He said it fits perfectly: "Pity the country that has two governments and nobody interested in governing."

The talent pool "would come back in a heartbeat should there be a real, valid, credible opportunity," Megerisi added. However, Toby Chitayat, an associate at CRI Menas, takes a more sceptical view. As a UK risk consultancy, his firm watches the situation closely. Set against Libya's east-west split, its volatile oil revenue and endemic corruption, he argued its effect on governance or investor confidence "is comparatively minimal".

Yet he acknowledged that it remains "far too early to say anything definitive about the prospect of serious re-engagement with the country." For those who left, the calculus is more personal. Mizran has spent recent years studying sites in Tripoli. She works out what rebuilding the city might mean beyond simply putting up new buildings.

"Ultimately, as an architect, I want to be part of rebuilding Libya's architectural landscape," she said. "I don't know exactly what that return will look like yet, but I know that remains part of the future that I'm working towards." A sense of stability in the country will prompt a stronger wave of the diaspora wanting to return, she noted. You cannot simply just ask people to come back because their country needs them. You have to create a country they can believe in and build their lives in.