Only 56,000 People 

NUUK, Greenland — Greenland currently has a population of roughly 56,000 people, which creates the problem of not having enough workers or enough diversified skills for certain demands. Two major areas where Greenland lacks manpower are education and healthcare.

Through Denmark, Greenland has access to free education and healthcare. However, according to T. Aagaard and L. Seibæk of the Greenland Centre of Health Research and Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark, respectively, Greenland faces issues of hiring and retaining employees for healthcare. According to MoveGreenland, educational positions are also in high demand.

Greenland has 73 public schools for primary education, one university for higher education, and five hospitals, one of which is a national hospital located in Nuuk, with the other four being regional. There are 55 smaller health stations and 11 health centers across the country for more basic, primary care, according to the Nordic Co-operation. These are all spread across the 18.1 billion square feet of Greenland.

The lack of educators not only stems from the small population but also from the Danish colonization of the country. Until 1970, only the Danish language was taught in schools. When Greenland gained more governmental autonomy with the Home Rule Act in 1979, the schools switched to teaching Greenlandic, according to Trap Greenland.

“There are some issues on how many get an education,” Professor Naja Trondhjem of the University of Copenhagen said, “because the statistics say that half of the public school graduates do not go further to another education because they have too low competency levels of Greenlandic, Danish, and English. This is partly because our Greenlandic materials have been based on the Danish materials, so they have sort of translated the Danish materials.”

Trondhjem said that while the school systems have been trying to correct these issues, it has been a slow process. There were no Greenlandic educational materials at the time Greenland gained home rule, and they are still in limited quantity today.

“When it comes to grammar, for example,” Trondhjem continued, “they used missionary grammars which were made for missionaries to learn the language. It has been transformed into Greenlandic grammar learning. The children have learned their language as if it were a foreign language, because that’s the only grammar lessons they have.”

Another contribution to the lack of Greenlandic education comes from the lack of Greenlandic teachers.

“There should be more of these [Greenlandic] teachers,” Trondhjem said. “For example, at the high school, it should be university-level educated staff, but they’re taking high school-educated people to teach because there are not many others, and it is not paid well.”

Being that there is only one university in Greenland, the subjects it can teach are limited.

“There are a lot of programs that we do not have at this university,” Professor Lars Demant-Poort of The University of Greenland said. “So, if you want to go in a particular direction with your studies, it may not be possible to pursue that in Greenland. Then you would have to leave the country to do so.”

The inaccessibility to the different majors and areas of study, let alone higher education, because of the language competency struggles, has led to staffing shortages in a variety of careers in Greenland.

“At the government,” Trondhjem said, “all the advisory jobs for Parliament are still held by Danes, because they lack educated personnel for these jobs. There are only a few doctors and nurses, and they must hire a lot of Danes for these positions. It makes it harder for the hospital to fill jobs.”

Despite having free healthcare through Denmark, the lack of medical personnel in Greenland has greatly impacted its citizens.

“The health care in Greenland is not optimal,” Hanne Kirkegaard, the Nuuk Art Museum’s director, said. “There is some attention to it politically, but a plan for improvements has not emerged yet.”

Some residents are displeased with Denmark for how much they have gained from Greenland, and how little they have received in return.

“I think if they have so much money from here,” Asiarpa Frederiksen-Lund, a shop owner in Nuuk, said, “Denmark, why do we not have a good hospital? If you are sick, we do not have a good hospital here. But Denmark they have a very good hospital, very good education, and many teachers.”

The lack of medical personnel has led to a shortage of specialized care available to residents of Greenland in their own homeland.

“Our population isn’t that big,” Arnakkuluk Kliest said. “We don’t have a lot of specialists, so we have to travel for help if it’s something very specific. For people who have cancer or something else that they need help with, they often have to travel to Denmark.”

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This story is part of a semester-long investigative reporting project into Greenland’s people, history, and culture. It was created by an advanced reporting class in the Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies program at UW-Milwaukee. Other stories from the project are available on Edge of the Arctic: Greenland, the Land of the People.

This work was made possible through the support of MPC Endowment Ltd., the philanthropic affiliate of the Milwaukee Press Club, and a private donor.