One scholarship will be awarded to a woman of Afghan descent to study at the University of Oxford each year in a new endowment from the Weidenfeld-Hoffman Trust. The scholarship, announced this month, will cover postgraduate tuition, travel costs, accommodation, and general living costs.
Eligible students must have already met the admission requirements for postgraduate study at Oxford and be of first- or second-generation Afghan descent. The money will endow the scholarship permanently, allowing it to continue supporting a female Afghan postgraduate student each year.
The scholarship results from a £2.5 million donation from Shabana Basij-Rasikh, an Afghan educationalist. Basij-Rasikh was herself a recipient of a scholarship from the Weidenfeld-Hoffman Trust, which allowed her to study for an MSc in Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government.
Afghanistan remains the only country to formally disallow access to education for girls beyond primary school, with an estimated 2.4 million girls barred from secondary education as of 2026. More than five years since the Taliban’s second takeover of Afghanistan, higher education has more broadly been curtailed. Female enrolment in the nation’s universities reached zero by 2024, while male enrolment nearly halved between 2019 and 2024.
Ongoing visa restrictions from the Home Office mean that applications from Afghan nationals made outside the UK will automatically be rejected. Consequently, women in Afghanistan who are not dual citizens will not be able to apply for a student visa and therefore cannot take up a place to study at the University of Oxford. Basij-Rasikh, who funded the scholarship, has raised concerns over the UK’s visa brake policy toward Afghanistan.
Introduced in March 2026, the Home Office has stated that the visa brake is temporary and will be reviewed regularly, but said it will only cease when the “UK government considers it appropriate to do so”. However, a University spokesperson told Cherwell: “The visa brake is based only on the main nationality you give on your application form. Applicants who have a valid visa for the UK are still able to apply for an in-country visa extension or another visa route in-country if eligible.”
The scholarship is scheduled to support its first beneficiary starting from September 2027.
Additional reporting by Jeremy Azzopardi.
