Ghana’s scholarship gap: Why local talent like Juliana Somuah must look abroad for opportunity

When a congratulatory email lands in a young Ghanaian’s inbox, it often comes from an institution thousands of kilometres away. These messages usually come with stipends, mentorship, and conference access—benefits that few local awards provide. For top students, they read less like invitations and more like ready-made career plans, underscoring the widening gap between global institutions and Ghana’s own support systems for talent.

At home, domestic scholarships are scarce, oversubscribed, and narrow in scope. Many cover tuition but exclude research or living stipends, leaving lower-income students sidelined. Application processes are often opaque, with shifting requirements, short timelines, and limited feedback. Research support—laboratories, journals, fieldwork, or travel—is rarely bundled into local awards, making it difficult for students to build competitive academic records.

This is the context in which Juliana Somuah, a Ghanaian Ph.D. student in Infrastructure and Environmental Systems at the University of North Carolina Charlotte, thrives abroad. Somuah recently received the 2024 Buck Fisher Greater Triangle Scholarship from the International Facility Management Association (IFMA) Foundation in the United States, a recognition of her academic excellence, leadership, and interpersonal skills. The award includes an all-expenses-paid trip to the IFMA World Workplace Conference in San Antonio, Texas—the world’s largest facility management gathering.

Somuah is already contributing to high-visibility IFMA projects, from studies on facility managers’ leadership traits to global benchmarking of operations. These outputs are directly shaping international best practices in areas like maintenance regimes, return-to-office strategies, and AI-driven insight generation. For Ghana, the relevance is clear: ministries, hospitals, universities, malls, and factories all face rising costs, skills gaps, and ageing assets. Benchmarking tools and AI-driven knowledge sharing could help facility managers in Tamale or Accra access global solutions without waiting for a yearly workshop.

But opportunities like Somuah’s remain rare. While Ghana produces world-class talent, the domestic support ecosystem is shallow. Public and private scholarships are limited, universities are underfunded, and corporate philanthropy for education is underdeveloped. This leaves ambitious students chasing foreign fellowships, where resources and networks are abundant.

The result is brain drain. Ghanaian students who excel abroad often stay abroad, drawn by better salaries, technology, and career ladders. Somuah earned her first degree in Ghana, yet as her career advances in U.S. programmes, she is already described as “American-trained”—a label that reflects Ghana’s initial investment but little of the long-term return.

To change this equation, analysts and advocates argue that Ghana must expand homegrown opportunities: fully funded fellowships that include stipends and research support, research-to-practice labs linked to local needs, and return grants that encourage scholars to reinvest their expertise locally. With stronger pipelines and visible career paths, Ghana’s brightest students can build their futures at home—and the nation will reap the dividends.