Paper long abstract:

Scholarships can open up opportunities for young people from developing countries and building academic capacity, transforming lives and building institutions. Their role in development is recognised as part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, in Target 4.b: to expand the availability of scholarships by 2020.

This paper will examine the challenges facing scholarship funders and providers to maximise the impact of scholarships to young people from sub-Saharan Africa. It draws on the knowledge and experience of RUFORUM, an experienced provider of scholarships to young Africans, and Education Sub Saharan Africa (ESSA), whose research has fed directly into the evaluation of SDG 4.b. for UNESCO's 2020 Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report on Education & Inclusion.

ESSA's mapping of 350 scholarship providers and in-depth at the practices of 20 of the top 50 providers shows that as demand for quality Higher Education across Africa surges, scholarships for sub-Saharan African students look to be increasing too. However inclusive development is often not prioritised and many programmes lack focus on impact for young people.

This lack of prioritisation is troubling. RUFORUM's experience points to the fact that inclusive scholarship provision in sub-Saharan Africa requires deliberate effort. It needs a streamlined institutional and policy environment with agile development partners willing to unlearn and re-learn to support co-creating working models. Inclusion will only be achieved with purpose and financing that comes with supportive criteria and looks beyond the narrow outcome of attaining a higher education qualification.

The paper will highlight four common challenges that undermine even some of the best programmes:

1. Inclusive access: are scholarships reaching marginalized groups?

2. Completion rates: are scholarships being delivered in such a way as to enable completion?

3. University engagement: what are effective ways of working between universities, scholarship providers and recipients?

4. Transition to employment: what is the best way to support graduates as they make the transition from education into work?

It will then go onto describe how a group of scholarship providers and funders, based across sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and North America are coming together to build consensus on the shared agenda to increase the impact of scholarships. This agenda for change will be supported by development of benchmarks, establishing good practice and tracking KPIs. We propose that these KPIs, once tried and tested could form the basis of a new global indicator for scholarships, focussed on outcomes for young people.

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