A Non-Profit organisation with a mission to mentor and empower young African students in fulfilling their dreams to pursue graduate studies via access to fully-funded scholarships in world-class foreign universities, I-Scholar Initiative (iSI), has announced 70 Nigerians as winners of its 2023 scholarship awards.
President of iSI, Victor Ogunmola, who made the announcement at the scholarship awarding and onboarding event held virtually, at the weekend, said the scholarship programme kicked off in 2019.
Ogunmola said about 1,450 applications was received last year and only 65 students were awarded while there was a great margin in 2023 as about 2,350 people applied but the organisation was only able to fund 70 students out of the huge numbers.
He, therefore, called for partners across the globe to key into the mission and help increase the numbers of awardees as the organisation was only able to cater for three per cent of the application got, which is quite low and needs a lot of improvements.
In his keynote speech at the event, Vice President of Global Service, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Uwem Ukpong, who spoke on the topic: “Dream Big, Go Far: Empowering Young African Scholars with iSI, congratulated the awardees, urging them to dream big and see themselves beyond the height they have attained.
Ukpong further charged the awardees to be exemplary, focus more on their studies and make Nigeria proud and great.
The awards offered by i-Scholar Initiative (iSI) will pay for standardized tests such as the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) and the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). Scores from the two tests are required by top universities in North America and Europe. The scholarship also covers a predetermined number of graduate school application fees and most importantly, an end-to-end mentoring program.
