"There has been debate recently about the ethics of recruiting doctors from developing countries to work in wealthier industrialised countries,¹, ² and various estimates have been made of the number of medical professionals who migrate each year,³  but very little empirical data exist to quantify the rate of migration or destination of medical graduates from developing countries.⁴ We aimed to examine the present whereabouts of three consecutive graduating classes of the College of Medicine of the University of Nigeria (UNN). There are 15 medical schools in Nigeria and UNN is the third oldest.⁵ We obtained the official class lists for 1995, 1996, and 1997, and attempted to locate as many individual members of the classes as we could, using informal networks. Our sources of information included class e-mail group lists, telephone interviews, and e-mailed questions. We also used a “snowball” approach by which participants recommended further sources of information on the whereabouts of classmates.There were 468 graduates: 152 in the 1995 class, 171 in the 1996 class, and 145 in the 1997 class. We were able to locate 416 (89%). The locations of 46 graduates were unknown and six were deceased. The figure shows the proportion of graduates by present country of residence for all three graduating sets combined."

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