Mastercard Foundation A decade of developing change-makers

Fall 2022

It’s been a decade since the Mastercard Foundation (MCF) and the American University of Beirut joined forces
to provide scholarships to the best and brightest of Africa and underserved native and displaced populations of Lebanon, with the ultimate aim of developing leaders who would some day return to their communities and transform them. Since that time, 204 scholars have graduated from the program, while 67 scholars are currently pursuing their degrees at AUB. They have come from Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, and refugee camps, along with 26 African countries including: Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Libya, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Somaliland, South Africa, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Tunisia, Uganda, and Zimbabwe.

“Since its inception, the focus of the program has been not only to provide scholarships, but opportunity for talented young people from disadvantaged backgrounds,” says Maha Makki, director of the Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program at AUB.

Ibrahim Bahati (MS ’20), who hails from Uganda, first learned of the MCF Scholars Program from a former professor on Facebook. “I saw that I’d done the kind of community development work they were interested in, like gender development, working with street kids, youth, so I applied,” Bahati says.

He arrived in Lebanon to begin his studies in rural community development in 2017. “It was an experience. I was one of only a handful of African students on campus at that time. For some people I was the first African student they’d ever spoken to in their lives, but by the time I left more had arrived.”

At AUB, he learned how to design and conduct research in rural settings and how to think about the systemic drivers of issues like poverty, malnutrition, and climate change.

Today, he is applying his training as a research fellow with the Human Sciences Research Council in South Africa, working on inclusive economic development. “So looking at the structural barriers facing African youth when it comes to employment and economic advancement.”

Closer to campus, Mastercard Foundation Scholar Adham Makarem (BS ’18, MD ’22) of Mount Lebanon became the first in his family to graduate from university in 2018 when he earned a degree in medical laboratory sciences, to be followed by a medical doctorate in 2022. “You know if your parents didn’t have this [higher education] experience, you don’t have that support and have to figure things out yourself,” he noted.

When he entered the Faculty of Health Sciences in 2015, Makarem made good use of a support system at AUB specially tailored to the needs and goals of Mastercard Foundation Scholars. “I still remember very vividly the workshops on personality development and advocacy. Those two were life-changing for me. A lot of it centered on finding the personal motivation to make an impact in whatever field, and thinking about the nature of that impact given one’s skills.” Today, he is the first MD and MCF graduate to earn a Fulbright Scholarship, through which he is pursuing a master’s in public health at Boston University.

Eslam Abo Al Hawa (BS ’21), who came to Lebanon in 2014 as a refugee from Syria, relied on her character and drive when applying to the Mastercard Foundation program. “It was extremely hard. I didn’t know the language and I wasn’t at all familiar with these types of applications,” she says. “I used Google Translate when filling it out. I was so worried about my English, but I realize now they were looking at me as a whole person, not just as someone who was weak in English.”

Given the often vast gulf between their home environments and that of AUB, scholars sometimes experience a sense of dislocation; the combination of the high academic standards, foreignness, and occasionally, prejudice, can be stressful.

“When the program started in 2012, most AUB students were coming from Lebanese private schools. So we were cognizant of some of the challenges these scholars might face,” Makki says, which is why scholars have special access to a variety of support services, including counseling and career services, and a peer-to-peer support program. “Being a Mastercard scholar gave me an immediate sense of community,” says Makarem.

In the spring of 2021, Abo Al Hawa graduated with a bachelor’s in computer science. “But I realized I didn’t want to spend my life working on apps for businesses, so I went back to AUB and entered the business analytics program.” She hopes to apply her analytics training to issues of community development. “I want to do something meaningful with my technical skills, working for the Mastercard Foundation would be great actually.”