Yusuf Brima

Yusuf Brima

Research Associate, Universität Osnabrück

Guides to Securing Scholarships Overseas

Date:

Objectives

The democratization of the Internet has opened vistas of opportunities for young people coming from underprivileged backgrounds to gain scholarships for further studies. This massive outpour of information has also saturated facts with fiction about what it takes to gain a prestigious scholarship program amid the ever-growing competitiveness among candidates for a few slot of opportunities. Thus, our aim in this webinar, the first of its kind (at least to our knowledge for the West African context), is to distill the essence of a scholarship, the does and don't in one's quest to get a scholarship and a general thinking paradigm to have to become a successful scholar. The paradigm in question is problem-solving and leadership-oriented ways of thinking because to be successful, one has to be so in the selfless service to humankind.

Event Structure

  • Welcome Address by Osas
  • Introduction of the key speaker by Abubakarr
  • Speaker session for 1 hr by Yusuf
  • Questioning time by Osas and Yusuf respond
  • Closing remarks by Osas
  • Sharing of rating form on the program by Abubakarr
Webinar Flyer showing the key speaker and moderators as well as event attendance link.
Figure (1) Presents the first event of this nature to be organized to help disseminate information on the best practices for securing opportunities to study abroad. Our goal is not to make a one-off event but to build a community that seeks to help other young people in the professional development path.

Registration Responses

Having gotten flyers out in getting the minds of the people prepared for the occasion, we decided to start a pre-assessment survey to know how eager people might be in getting involved in the program. As per our statistics, due to the first-time of an event of such nature to be organized.

  1. We had 43 responses of people that registered for the event.
  2. As per the report, we have 71.4% responses from University student.
  3. And 28.6% workers.
  4. About 50% responded to the post-attendance survery amid technological challenges and that was very exciting and inspiring.
Webinar Flyer showing the key speaker and moderators as well as event attendance link.
Figure(2) A chart of registered 42 participants for the webinar. Overall, the majority of the registrants were students either in their penultimate or final year of bachelor's degree programs. The primary motivation for this demographic to participate in an event of this nature is to enable them to seek better opportunities for capacity building in middle-income and developed countries notably due to the lack of skilled labor and institutional capacities to promote quality and affordable tertiary and vocational education in the Global South. The second major category indicates early-career and middle-career employees seeking social and economic mobility through leadership and professional skills training programs abroad. These are people in their mid-30s and early 40s looking for capacity strengthening opportunities abroad to return to help in public and private sector development in their home countries. Thus, this compelling evidence lays bare the necessity for organizing an event of this nature to help other young people in their quest for career growth.
Webinar Flyer showing the key speaker and moderators as well as event attendance link.
Figure (3) A Zoom screenshot of the closing section of Yusuf's presentation during the webinar. It shows a cross-section of the presenter, moderators, and participants in an interactive session. Participants were given the platform to air their questions which were responded to accordingly and their feedback showed an overwhelming satisfaction with the structure and content of the event remarking they have learned very invaluable insights about the do's and don'ts to be aware of when searching for and apply to any scholarship.
Figure (4) A chart of post-event responses based on participants' current affiliation. The figure shows a majority of the webinar's participants were from Nigeria and Nigerian universities. Sierra Leone is the second-highest represented country of origin in this Webinar. The reason the two countries have two-thirds of the participants is primarily because of the information dissemination means that was used viz-a-viz, the organizers are from these respective countries thus their social media reach has a major impact on people from these places. Nonetheless, there were participants from outside of West Africa and Asia as well some of whom could not complete the post-attendance survey form. Nonetheless, the event was a major success as reported by attendees.

Useful Materials

The slides for this webinar have been uploaded and can be accessed from the following link. Slides

Links

To help bootstrap the search for scholarships, we have created a non-exhaustive list of some of the popular (by some definition of the word popular) for potential candidates from developing countries. Most of these are recurring programs and we have decidedly not included the deadline of application and other requisite information because major great websites and blogs have already invested a lot into putting such information for public consumption together. So, make them your friend. Our aim here is to bring an essential element, a human touch to your journey of finding a suitable opportunity and this is just a first step in that direction.

Targeted Programmes

Commonwealth Scolarship
Gates Cambridge
Chevening
Queen Elizabeth Commonwealth Scholarship
Mastercard foundation Scholars Program
Fulbright Scholar Program
Government of Ireland – International Education Scholarships 2022
DAAD
Chinese Government Scholarships
Global Korea Scholarship
Japanese Government (MEXT)

Online Portals

ScholarshipDb
Euraxess
OpportunityDesk
Oyaop
OpportunitiesForAfricans
Scholarshipset
Scholars4Dev
AfterschoolAfrica