Results: Before Studying in Germany

One of the KAAD’s goals is to support as many students as possible from financially disadvantaged families in order to enable them to advance socially through education and thus contribute to combating poverty in their countries of origin. In our online survey, almost half of the alumni stated that they came from a lower-middle class family (49.7%), another quarter from the upper-middle class (24.9%), about 12% assigned their family to the lower class and 2% to the upper class in their countries of origin. In Ghana, a particularly large number of alumni come from financially weak families who traditionally earn their income from agriculture. More than three quarters of the Ghanaian alumni and scholarship holders interviewed have at least one parent who works or used to work in agriculture. In many cases, both parents and also close relatives worked in agriculture. A 27 year old Ghanaian scholarship holder from a village near Tamale in northern Ghana describes her social background as follows:In addition, many Ghanaian alumni have relatively many siblings, in some cases up to 12. This includes one alumnus who grew up in poor circumstances in a village in the far northwest of Ghana and has six other siblings. All of his ancestors were subsistence farmers with low incomes. He is the first academic in the family and the first to have been abroad. He is now a professor at KNUST University in Kumasi and is building his own house for his family of two children. Another alumnus stresses that rural life in Ghana makes access to education difficult:The interviewed alumni from Colombia also come predominantly from rather low-income families. Without state support, they would hardly have had a chance to study. One Colombian alumnus commented:In contrast, the sponsored Indonesian alumni predominantly come from rather wealthier families. This is also due to the fact that many of them descended from Catholic Chinese who emigrated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and founded successful companies in Indonesia or got relatively well-paid jobs in the energy and technology industries.