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Herald Reporter
SCHOLARSHIPS and student exchange programmes play an important role in cementing relations and mutual understanding between and among nation states, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Trade has said.

In a statement, the Ministry said it is against this backdrop that President Mnangagwa came up with the idea of setting up a scholarship programme for deserving Zimbabwean students to study at the University of Zambia (UNZA) during the special graduation ceremony at UNZA in Lusaka where he was conferred with an Honorary PhD in 2019.

“Zimbabwe has not been an exception. Since independence, it has received a lot of goodwill from countries across the globe as many students have been offered scholarships to study in different fields in those countries.”

“At national level, such gestures of friendship have helped strengthen mutual understanding and cooperation between Zimbabwe and the many countries that provided scholarships to its students. At a personal level, scholarships have made possible the establishment of people-to-people relations as students have made life-long friendships in the countries they were studying, and in some instances marriages and cross-cultural pollination happened.”

President Mnangagwa is an alumnus of the UNZA where he graduated with a Bachelor of Laws degree in 1976 and the idea of the scholarships became a reality with the launch of the Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa University of Zambia Scholarship Programme on 28 January 2021 at the University of Zimbabwe.

A number of countries have offered scholarships for Zimbabwean students to study at their institutions of higher learning again with a bias towards the sciences, technology and maths. These countries include Algeria, Cuba, China, Egypt, India, Japan, Malaysia, Russia, Republic of Korea, USA, United Kingdom, Ghana, Nigeria, Germany, former Yugoslavia, and Zambia.