Commonwealth Scholarships: Closing Equity Gaps by Sharing Our Commonwealth
January 6by Jasmine Koria
Despite its distance from both Europe and the continental United States, the Commonwealth Pacific has consistently yielded small but high-achieving cohorts of United Kingdom (UK) postgraduate scholars over the last few years.
Samoa, in particular, has been privileged to put forward between two and four candidates annually to study in the UK. This year, having secured a Commonwealth Distance Learning Masters Scholarship to study online with the UK’s Open University, I realize the imperativeness of the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission’s (CSC) work in the developing Pacific.
To begin with, the economies of the developing Commonwealth Pacific are fragile. The various insecurities and shortages that have defined our development over the last 50 years were, between 2019 and 2022, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic border closures. In such a region, funding opportunities for people who wish to study in the United Kingdom would be absolutely nil without the Chevening Scholarships, Commonwealth Shared Scholarships, and Commonwealth Distance Learning Scholarships which the CSC and similar donors administer.
In the developing Pacific, economically speaking, our people learn to prioritize “immediate” needs which, unfortunately, hardly ever include ‘Postgraduate Study at a World Class UK University’. By ‘immediate needs’ we mean food, electricity bills, the school fees of our children or younger siblings, medical costs for our elderly relatives, and contributions to church and village projects as well as extended family gatherings. A Commonwealth Scholarship allows people like me to realize and benefit from the universal human right to self-improvement via education. It also allows us to return home and help to improve our families, villages and countries so that someday, we can afford to add whatever kind of postgraduate study we want to our list of immediate goals.
Secondly, Commonwealth Scholarships are an important facilitator of continued diplomatic relations between the Pacific and the United Kingdom. A key outcome of this year’s Commonwealth Heads of Government Meetings in Apia, Samoa, was the initiation of a new Commonwealth Small Island Developing States stream, for masters-level study in the UK.
Because scholarship recipients are essentially the few chosen out of many applicants, they are also distinctive representatives of their countries and cultural groups. CSC scholarships give Pacific people the unique opportunity to act as ambassadors for their home countries and the UK scholarship scheme through which they are studying. Aside from being a key catalyst for increased cultural exchange between Pacific people and their global counterparts, CSC’s initiatives also increase the visibility of Pacific stories, perspectives, languages, traditions, histories and successes.
The world has become extremely interconnected in the last two decades, but there are still many people who are not fully aware of the Pacific’s existence as an active participant in spaces like the Commonwealth, the United Nations and the World Economic Forum. CSC scholarships help to change this. They give us more light and more space within which to really see one another as members of the global family. That, to me, is the best learning outcome anyone could hope for.
