About 200 Ghanaian students on government scholarships in Russia say they are starving, stranded and broke after going 14 months without stipends, while repeated appeals to authorities have fallen on deaf ears.
In a bid to force action, the leadership of the National Union of Ghana Students (NUGS), Russia, engaged the Ghana Embassy in Moscow back in June, this year. Following that engagement, the leadership were told that the Embassy had received funds from the Ghana Scholarship Authority (GSA, but that each student, whether undergraduate or postgraduate, would receive a paltry flat sum of only $300, regardless of the massive backlog.
That offer is a “cruel joke,” the students intimated, given that postgraduates are entitled to $500 monthly while undergraduates get $300.
With the new academic year kicking off on Tuesday, September 1, 2026, desperation is now boiling over. Many face imminent eviction from dormitories. Others have not paid visa renewal fees, recently hiked across the Russian Federation, and now risk deportation.
In a recent media interview, the NUGS Russia President, Jibril Kojo Nkum, made a public appeal for urgent government intervention, revealing that the students were drowning in debt as living costs and mandatory fees soar.
Meanwhile students who have borrowed from friends were now being hounded to repay. And under Russian law, scholarship students are barred from taking up any work to earn income, trapping them in a spiral of hunger and helplessness with no way out.
In the wake of their dire situation, the students reiterated the appeal made by their leaders to the government to facilitate the payment of their stipends, failure of which, they warned, would force them to sleep outside.
