Around the Commonwealth: New scholarships fund to widen education access

A new endowment fund set up to help bright students take up places on postgraduate courses around the Commonwealth is to be managed by the Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU), the world’s oldest inter-university network.

Launched earlier this month by Commonwealth Secretary-General Kamalesh Sharma at the 17th Conference of Commonwealth Education Ministers, in Malaysia, the Anniversary Endowment Fund will increase the range of countries in which Commonwealth scholarships are available, particularly low and middle income countries.

Set up to mark 50 years since the Commonwealth first agreed to offer international scholarships at the Oxford education ministers conference of 1959, the Anniversary Endowment Fund will help hundreds more students take up postgraduate courses over the decades to come.

By managing the fund, the ACU will be helping to improve exchanges between Southern hemisphere countries as well as enabling students from developed countries to experience expanding higher education opportunities in developing countries across the globe.

“The idea is that it will be a permanent legacy of the 50th anniversary,” says Dr John Kirkland, the ACU’s Deputy Secretary-General for Development. “By having a pot of funds that can help countries host Commonwealth scholarships we’re really restoring the scheme to its original intention and going beyond – trying to make it the most international scholarship programme there is in the world.”

When the scheme was started back in 1959 the intention was that Commonwealth Scholarships would be offered by a wide range of Commonwealth countries, explains Dr Kirkland. While this was the case in the 1960s and 1970s, he adds, dwindling higher education resources in latter decades reduced the ability of developing countries to fund scholarships.

“What we’re trying to do, through this new fund, is help them back,” says Dr Kirkland. “There has been an expansion in Asia and Africa in higher education systems in the last few years and I think there are a number of speciality courses in these countries that can attract a very international audience.”

To date, some 27,000 people have benefited from a Commonwealth Scholarship since 1959, administered as it is through the Commonwealth Scholarship and Fellowship Plan.

More than 100 cabinet ministers and permanent secretaries, as well as supreme court judges, ambassadors, and university vice-chancellors, have benefited from the Scholarships, according to Dr Kirkland.

The ACU, he states, is confident that the Anniversary Endowment Fund will help boost this figure higher – helping even more people to get to “the very top rung of their profession”.

“The intention isn’t to replace the money that countries like Canada, New Zealand and India and the UK are putting in every year to host Commonwealth Scholarships,” says Dr Kirkland. “It is to expand that so that citizens of those countries and other Commonwealth countries have got a pretty unique chance to go and study in, say, East Africa, or West Africa or South Asia and East Asia, the Caribbean and the Pacific.

“All of these countries could expand their role as a host in the scheme by getting some support from the new fund.”

Already donors have pledged nearly £1.4 million to the fund, with the Commonwealth Secretariat and the UK and Malaysian Governments among the contributors. Fundraising continues until October 2010 and Dr Kirkland is confident that the final fund figure will swell above this, though he concedes that it is “not the most certain time” to be trying to raise money.

However, he says, because the fund has the potential to offer a huge benefit for relatively little investment, it is important that potential donors dip into their pockets.

“Even a fund of £2-5 million, which generates let’s say 5 per cent income every year, could have quite a significant impact,” notes Dr Kirkland. “With the kind of award we’re offering, that could be 30 to 50 awards a year - forever. So that’s quite a big step that we’re taking here and quite a lot of impact.”

Founded in 1913, the ACU is made up of around 500 universities from around the Commonwealth. As well as managing the Anniversary Endowment Fund the association assists members develop their human resources capacity, promotes the movement of academic and administrative staff and students between countries, and organises numerous higher education conferences and forums.

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