After training as a nurse, Nevielle Leinyuy spent almost a decade in Cameroon working as a front desk receptionist because he was unable to find a decent-paying job in the medical field. Last year, he gave up looking. He applied for a nursing program in Canada, where he now lives with his wife and children.

“They are stealing us from Cameroon,” the 39-year-old Leinyuy said. “We want to work in Cameroon but there is no pay, so we have to look for other options.”

Cameroon has one of the world’s lowest ratios of health workers per capita. About a third of trained doctors who graduated from medical school last year left the country, the minister of higher education, Jacques Fame Ndongo, has said.

Many doctors and nurses are leaving the West African nation for more lucrative jobs in Europe and North America. Canada, like Cameroon, has official languages of English and French.

Leinyuy said he would have earned 60,000 CFA francs, or less than $100 a month, working as a nurse in Cameroon.

“Just imagine what a family of a father with three kids and a wife would do with that,” he said. “The rent of my house alone was 40,000 francs ($66).”

Cameroon is not the only sub-Saharan African country where low salaries are driving health workers to leave.