The Impact of Studies and Scholarships Abroad on Developmental Commitment at Home. A Case Study about DAAD and Fulbright Alumni from the Global South (working title)

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The broad objective of this study is to identify and analyze links between migration, education, and development. Precisely, we want to investigate how former international students engage in developmental activities in their country of origin and whether studies and scholarship programs abroad can have an impact on these developmental activities at home. We raise this question, because international students are perceived as „ideal migrants,“ who are well-educated and well-integrated when they enter the labor market as highly skilled workers in the country of studies. They are also valuable for the countries of origin, because they can transfer their gained know- how and capital back by remigration or transnational networks from abroad, which can contribute to the development in countries of origin. Therefore, more and more countries (of studies as well as of origin) want to support these developments by awarding scholarships to international students. However, there is no significant research yet on the correlation between received scholarships and developmental engagement of former students.In a forerunner project, we already investigated forms of development-related commitment of former international students in the countries of origin in the case of the scholarship program of the KAAD (Krannich/Hunger 2020, see 1 State of the art and preliminary work). However, the findings of the study are not representative for international students in general, because the KAAD is a relatively small and religiously-bound scholarship program in Germany that funds less than 400 international scholarship holders per year, and, bound by contract, they have to go back to their country of origin after graduation. For this reason, we investigated mainly returned students, and only a few ones who remained in Germany (about 10 percent). However, the results implied that there could be a linkage between scholarship programs and future developmental engagement of international alumni, but it needs more research on the ones who go back to the country of origin as well as the ones who remain after graduation in the country of studies. Therefore, this submitted project aims particularly to investigate the linkage between scholarships and developmental commitments of international alumni from the Global South – particularly from Colombia, Ghana and Indonesia – in the specific cases of the scholarship programs of the DAAD in Germany and Fulbright in the United States (the largest scholarship programs in their countries), which would have more representativeness and validity.