Students from Ghana at UK universities say they are in danger of being deported after being stranded by their own government without promised scholarships or tuition fee payments.
The group representing more than 100 doctoral students has petitioned Downing Street and Keir Starmer asking for help to persuade the Ghanaian government to pay the backlog of tuition fees and living allowances running into millions of pounds.
Prince Komla Bansah, the president of the group of students, said some have already been deported by the Home Office after their universities withdraw their registrations for non-payment; while others have been evicted from their accommodation or forced to borrow money to survive.
Bansah said: “For most of these students, I don’t know how they survive. Some of them may be working part-time but it’s very hard to do that while studying for a PhD. From what I can gather from our meetings with the students, a lot of them are in debt and getting loans from back home.”
The petition sent to Downing Street says the funding crisis “is so severe that some colleagues are now facing court cases over unpaid rent. To survive, some have had to depend on food banks because they have no money to feed themselves.”
The students affected are at institutions spread across Britain, including University College London, Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen and the universities of Nottingham, Bradford, Warwick, Lincoln and Liverpool.
Ghanaian authorities said that after President John Mahama’s new administration was sworn in last January, it found inherited debts to about 110 institutions in the UK worth an estimated £32m.
Alex Kwaku Asafo-Agyei, the registrar of the Ghana scholarship secretariat in Accra, said an audit of all scholarships given out by the last administration was continuing while a pause had been placed on new scholarships to the UK.
After his appointment in April, Asafo-Agyei said he went on a “fact-finding mission” to the UK and drew up instalment plans with some of the institutions. But he said some of the universities had since rescinded the agreements.
Asafo-Agyei said Ghana had made “significant payments to our partner institutions in the UK and we have agreed to amicably resolve these issues so that our students are not at a loss”. He added that he was “not at liberty to make such disclosures without express approval from above”.
Asafo-Agyei declined to answer how much of the debt has been paid so far.
About 30 of the Ghanian PhD students said the scholarship secretariat had failed to pay their tuition fees since 2024, with some barred from officially graduating, submitting work or accessing their university’s facilities.
Others have missed support payments for more than three years, while Bansah said the government had also failed to renew its letters of support for scholarship holders already studying in the UK.
Bansah said: “We all agree that the new government only came into power in January but the reality is that the government was already aware of the situation and it still hasn’t made the payments.
“Meanwhile, there is evidence that they have still awarded foreign scholarships, so why are they still awarding scholarships when they know there is still a major problem with the UK?”
Earlier this year, more than 180 Ghanaian students at the University of Memphis in the US complained about missing payments from the secretariat.
Students from other countries have also struggled with the same problems. In 2020, Nigerian students protested outside their high commission in London after some students lost course places. More recently, hundreds of South African students in Russia faced eviction from campus after delays in receiving government scholarships.
