News

Mastercard Foundation Scholar Glora Tumushabe is featued in this article from UC Berkeley News.  

Abdoul Aziz grew up in Côte d’Ivoire in West Africa and moved to South Africa, where he received the Mastercard Foundation Scholarship to come to the US as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley. He was selected as a part of the 2019 GLBOE Ambassador Program. Let’s hear about Abdoul Aziz’s transformative experience traveling to Singapore and the Philippines with GLOBE.  Read the full GLOBE article.

This article feature 7 Mastercard Foundation Scholars: Nebiat Assefa Melles (’18), Carlos Mureithi (’19), Boikanyo Tefu (’20), Waringa Kamau (’17), Tawanda Kanhema (’14), Grace Oyenubi (’18), Alsanosi Adam (’16).  Read the full article from the Graduate School of Journalism.

First comes the honeymoon, then the culture shock, followed by an adjustment period and finally mastery. That’s the “U-Curve” trajectory typically experienced by international students, according to the Berkeley International Office.

The campus held a festive event Friday to honor six students from Sub-Saharan Africa earning master’s degrees this month. The group is the first graduating cohort from UC Berkeley’s partnership with The Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program.  Read the full Berkeley News article.

The Study on sub-Saharan African Alumni (PARIS) was officially launched during a two-day workshop held last December at UC Berkeley with participants from seven universities – University of Toronto, McGill, and Simon Frasier (Canada), Earth University (Costa Rica) and UC Berkeley, Stanford, and Arizona State University (USA).  Read the Graduate Division article on

At Zengeza 1 High School in Zimbabwe, students have long called two of their buildings the Harvard Campus. They named them in hopes that, at least every other year, someone from their impoverished but proud school of 2,500 students, all of them from families earning less than $300 a year, would be admitted to the Ivy League.  Read the full Berkeley News article.

Growing up in western Kenya, Lilian Kabelle had always dreamed of going to Berkeley—only 10,000 miles, an acceptance letter and the means stood in her way. Now, as a Mastercard Foundation Scholar, Kabelle is attending Berkeley at no cost as part of a $500 million education initiative to provide full scholarships for students in developing countries who exemplify a “give back” ethos.  Read the full article from the College of Engineering.

Mastercard Foundation Scholar Lilian Kabelle featured in this Bear Perspective for the Light the Way campaign.  

An estimated 2.2 million Sub-Saharan Africans under the age of 30 will enter the labor force between 2011 and 2015, yet less than 6 percent of the region’s young people enroll in university. That means the $30 million in educational support recently awarded to the University of California, Berkeley, by The MasterCard Foundation Scholars Program is a game-changer for the region.

Journalists Dzinya Djuba and Esther Adjepong tell us about the Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program at UC Berkeley.  See the video on CalTV's YouTube Channel.  

UC Berkeley will get $30 million over eight years to educate 113 African students, including seven who arrived this year.  Read the full SFGate article.

Over the next eight years, 113 students from sub-Saharan Africa will be awarded full-ride scholarships to UC Berkeley thanks to a program recently launched by the Mastercard Foundation.  Read the full DailyCal article.