The IDE Sub-Saharan African Student Scholarship
The International and Development Economics one-year master’s program traces its history back to 1955 when it began bringing young economists and statisticians in public service from other countries to pursue advanced training at Yale and return to their home countries. Today students still come from all over the world, and many graduates return to government service, while others go on to top-ranked PhD programs, research organizations and the private sector.
Beginning in the 2022-2023 academic year, the program began offering scholarships to promising students from sub-Saharan Africa to make the program more accessible. Since then six scholarship recipients have completed the program, and four of them are continuing into PhD tracks at Princeton, Yale, Cornell, and the University of Michigan.
Students funded by the EGC-IDE African Student Scholarship initiative have professional interests that span from environmental economics and natural resource policy, to health economics, and to labor economics and industrial policy.
International students have long noted that they choose the IDE program for their graduate studies away from their home country, because IDE has a reputation among Master's programs around the globe as a very cooperative and highly supportive program. In addition to cohorts of IDE students being highly collegial and close-knit year in and year out, the students get a great deal of close attention from their faculty mentors, as well as the support and professional advice of the highly-engaged community of IDE alumni and alumnae. We attribute the success of our African Student Scholarship awardees to the awesome energy of the selected students and the strong support they receive from their families and communities, in conjunction with the highly supportive and collaborative environment of the IDE program at Yale.
If you are interested in supporting the IDE Sub-Saharan African Student Scholarship program, please reach out to deanna.ford@yale.edu.
There are two reasons for our focus on students from Sub-Saharan Africa. First, African economists remain underrepresented in senior positions in many local governments and multilateral institutions such as the World Bank and IMF. As a result, policy decisions are often made either by economists without deep local knowledge or by policymakers without advanced economic training. Our scholarship program aims to address this gap. Our students bring unique institutional and cultural knowledge of their countries of origin and receive here rigorous training in economic modeling and data analysis.
Second, precisely because of their backgrounds and experiences, our African students greatly enrich discussions both inside and outside the classroom. Students and faculty alike learn from them about international and development economics.
Alumni Testimonials
"My time here has genuinely been life-changing. What I will carry with me most are the people: strangers who became family, and conversations with peers who cared deeply about completely different things and parts of the world yet shared the same curiosity to understand and improve them. Through the freedom to explore ideas across the core, electives, and my thesis, IDE helped shape my interest in research and analytical work focused on education and economic systems, while giving me the confidence to pursue opportunities in spaces where data and policy meet real-world decision making."
- Philips Ametsikor, Class of 2026
“When I think about Yale, the word that comes to my mind is opportunity. The opportunity to learn, the opportunity to network, and the opportunity to grow. I think those types of opportunities are what matter most.”
- Clair Kevin Nshimirimana, Class of 2026
Learn more about Clair Kevin's journey from civil war-era Burundi to Yale’s International and Development Economics (IDE) program.
"The IDE Program at Yale was my stepping stone, a lift, and a shoulder to lean on during my transition to the United States. It gave me a head start and a rigorous analytical foundation that is enabling me to pursue research at the intersection of climate, energy, and development economics. The combination of advanced econometrics, development theory, and access to exceptional faculty has pushed me to ask better and bolder research questions. The people, including the faculty, staff, and a wonderfully diverse cohort of peers, made my one-year experience outstanding. After graduation, I completed a predoctoral program at the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. I am now starting a PhD at Princeton University's SPIA this fall, and I can confidently say that Yale IDE was instrumental in getting me there."
- Jennifer Agbo, Class of 2025
“Coming to Yale from Nigeria, I found the IDE program to be hugely transformative for my academic and professional trajectory. The program gave me the training, mentorship, and research opportunities that prepared me for my role at the Development Innovation Lab and continue to shape my current PhD studies at Cornell University.”
- Funmilayo Ajayi, Class of 2023
“The IDE program at Yale provided the rigorous quantitative and analytical training that launched my career in economic consulting. The research assistantship at the Yale Economic Growth Center gave me hands-on exposure to applied development economics research, and through strong career support, the program opened doors I couldn’t have accessed otherwise and gave me the confidence and opportunities to walk through them.”
- Abdullah Jallow, Class of 2023