Government fails to pay stipends of scholarship students in Hungary for 8 months

Ghanaian students studying in Hungary on scholarships have not received their stipends from the government for the past eight months.

According to the Chairperson of the Academic Committee of the Association of Ghanaian Students Studying in Hungary, Nii Aryee, all efforts to get the government to pay their stipend have proven futile.

In an interview with GhanaWeb, Nii Aryee said the failure of the government to make these payments has caused the eviction of some students from their apartments due to their inability to pay rent.

"We understand this scholarship agreement is due for payment of stipends for the past eight months. Efforts made by the student executives to get the Government of Ghana to fulfil these payments have yielded no results thus far.

"The student executives would like to use your platform to draw the attention of the government to our needs. The situation is hard for the majority of students. In some cases, students have been evicted from their apartments due to their inability to pay rent.

"Most students have to combine work with studies which would have been ok in other jurisdictions like Germany and the UK, but here in Hungary, flexible student jobs are scarce and paid poorly; thus, it's not enough to sustain students. This is having a significant impact on the quality of studies. In summary, it's not a sustainable situation," he said.

He urged the government to focus on paying their stipends so they could focus on their studies, as that was the primary reason they were in Hungary.

Ghanaian students studying in Hungary on scholarship was made possible through a bilateral agreement between the Government of Ghana and the Government of Hungary.

The Stipendium Hungaricum Scholarship Programme was launched in 2013 by the Hungarian government to promote the internationalisation of Hungarian higher education.

The Stipendium Hungaricum spans three years, with the Ministry of Education representing Ghana and the Scholarship Secretariat acting as the coordinating and implementing agency.

A memorandum of understanding, signed in 2015, allowed this collaborative facility to train 50 Ghanaian students annually in various Bachelor and Postgraduate programmes at the tertiary level of education. These include Engineering, Agriculture and Business Administration and to mention a few.

YNA/DA