Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program at the University of British Columbia

Last verified: 18 August 2026

The expression of interest for the Winter 2027 intake closes on 6 September 2026, and the form only opens on 31 August 2026. That is a working window of roughly six days.

Read that twice, because it shapes everything else on this page. The funding, the eligible degrees, the interviews in December, the offer letters in February, all of it sits behind one short opening window at the end of August. Find this post on 7 September with nothing prepared and you are applying next cycle instead. Find it today and you have about three weeks to gather transcripts, brief your referees and write something you are proud of before the door even opens.

The Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program at the University of British Columbia is a fully funded Master’s scholarship in Vancouver, Canada, built for young African leaders who intend to take their skills back home. UBC’s first phase of the partnership supported over 171 Scholars. The current phase is aiming at 351 academically talented young people from Africa. This guide walks through the timeline, the four application rounds, who qualifies, what the award covers and where applicants tend to lose their place.

The timeline that decides everything

The programme runs on fixed rounds, and each one closes before the next opens. Here is the published schedule for the Winter 2027 intake.

• Applications open: 31 August 2026
• Expression of interest deadline: 6 September 2026
• Round 1, Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program application: 15 to 30 September 2026
• Round 2, faculty application at UBC: 1 to 20 November 2026, and the programme states plainly that late applications will not be considered
• Round 3, interviews: December into January, with interview invitations going out from around 20 December to 1 January
• Offers: February, with offer letters issued through to early March
• Scholars welcomed in Vancouver: August

Two things about this schedule are worth flagging before you plan around it.

First, the expression of interest window is unusually tight. Six days is not enough time to request a transcript from a university registrar in another country, sit an English test, or persuade a busy professor to write you a letter on official letterhead. The applicants who clear this stage comfortably are the ones who did the paperwork in August.

Second, the naming is confusing. The official page describes this as the Winter 2027 intake, while the programme timeline shows Scholars arriving in Vancouver in August. Those two statements can read as a contradiction to anyone outside UBC. Do not book flights or resign from a job on the basis of the word winter. Ask your faculty for the exact start date in writing once you have an offer.

Step one: the expression of interest, and the two streams

Everything begins with a short expression of interest form, and there are two separate versions of it. Choosing the wrong one wastes days you do not have.

• General stream: for all candidates except refugees. Form at https://ubc.ca1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_abEbecGlW7Z0LMW
• Refugee and displaced persons stream: for refugees only. Form at https://ubc.ca1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_4UT66EElsr19oGi

The refugee and displaced persons stream is not a formality. Access for refugees and displaced persons is written into the programme’s own priorities, so if you hold refugee status, that stream is the one built for your circumstances. Applying through the general stream instead does not help you and may cost you the consideration the programme set aside.

Both links were live when this post was checked, but note the timing. Applications open on 31 August 2026, so anyone opening the form before that date may find it is not yet accepting responses. That is expected. Come back on 31 August.

Step two: the Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program application

The next stage is the full scholarship application, submitted between 15 and 30 September 2026. This is the package the selection team reads properly.

You will need:

• The completed Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program application form, including the personal statements
• A CV or resume
• Two reference letters on official letterhead
• Transcripts

Pay close attention to how the references are handled. The programme’s instruction is that reference letters must be attached to the application, and it says in capital letters not to email them. Referees who send a letter directly to the admissions inbox, which is standard practice at many universities, are following a habit that does not apply here. Tell them this explicitly when you make the request, and ask them to send the signed letter back to you as a file you can attach yourself.

Give your referees at least two weeks and give them something to work with: the programme description, your draft personal statement, the deadline and a short note on what you would like them to speak to. A letter written from a blank page in twenty minutes reads exactly like one.

Step three: your UBC faculty application

The scholarship application and the university application are two different things, and passing the first does not admit you to the second. Between 1 and 20 November 2026, invited candidates apply to their chosen faculty at UBC in the normal way.

This is where the programme’s warning about late applications bites. There is no soft close, no grace period mentioned and no partial submission. If your transcript arrives on 21 November, the file is not read.

Practical implication: order any documents your faculty needs in October, not in November. International transcript requests routinely take weeks, and a delay at a registrar’s office in Nairobi, Accra or Kampala is not something UBC can absorb on your behalf.

Step four: interviews, then offers

Successful candidates are contacted for interviews across December and January, with invitations issued around the turn of the year. Offers for selected Scholars follow in February and run into early March.

Plan for that period. Late December and early January are when many people travel, switch phones or stop checking email. Set a reminder to check the inbox you used on the application every day through that window, spam folder included, and make sure the phone number you gave still works.

The Master’s programmes you can apply through

You cannot apply to any UBC Master’s you like. The scholarship is attached to a defined list of programmes across three faculties.

Faculty of Land and Food Systems:

• Master of Food and Resource Economics (MFRE)
• Master of Food Science (MFS)

Faculty of Forestry:

• Master of Sustainable Forest Management (MSFM)
• Master of International Forestry (MIF)
• Master of Urban Forestry Leadership (MUFL)
• Master of Geomatics for Environmental Management (MGEM)
• Master of Science or Master of Applied Science in Forestry, thesis based

Faculty of Science:

• Master of Data Science

Look at that list as a whole and the theme is hard to miss: food systems, forests, land, environmental data and applied analytics. If your background sits inside that space, you are competing on strong ground. If it does not, the honest answer is that this particular scholarship is not the route for you, and there is no version of a personal statement that fixes a mismatch of subject.

One more point worth making. A thesis based Master of Science or Master of Applied Science in Forestry works very differently from a course based professional Master’s such as the MIF or MGEM. A thesis programme usually expects you to have some sense of a research direction and often a supervisor who is willing to take you. Read the individual programme page before you commit to it in your application.

Check yourself against the eligibility list

Every criterion below has to be true. This is not a scoring system where strength in one area offsets a gap in another.

• You have completed a Bachelor’s degree
• You do not already hold a Master’s degree
• You are 35 years old or younger at the time of application, which the programme expresses as born in 1990 or after
• You are a citizen or a refugee of an African country
• You are applying for a Master’s in one of the eligible programmes listed above
• You meet the minimum academic requirements of the programme you have chosen
• You satisfy the English proficiency requirement if your Bachelor’s degree was not taught in English

That last point catches people out every year. If your degree was not delivered in English, you need a TOEFL or IELTS result, and you also need it to clear UBC’s own English requirement rather than just the test provider’s idea of a good score. Test dates fill up, and results take time to be released and sent. Book the sitting now if you have not already, because there is no realistic way to sit a test, receive a score and report it inside a six day window.

The rule about not already holding a Master’s degree is a genuine exclusion, not a preference. It exists because the programme is designed to open the first door to postgraduate study rather than fund a second one.

Application fees and the waiver that people forget to claim

Applying to UBC carries an application fee, and the programme provides relief in two ways.

• Applicants who are citizens of countries on the United Nations list of the 50 least developed countries receive an automatic fee waiver
• Everyone else may request a fee waiver at the point of submitting the Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program application package

Then comes the sentence to read slowly, because it costs real money: if you submit your application without applying your fee waiver, the programme states it is unable to provide a refund.

So the waiver is claimed during submission, not afterwards. Not by email the next morning, not once you notice the charge on your card. Before you click submit, stop and check the waiver has actually been applied on screen. Take a screenshot of the confirmation page while you are there.

What the scholarship actually pays for

The programme lists comprehensive support rather than a single cash figure. Published coverage includes:

• Tuition and books
• Flights and immigration support
• Room and board
• Stipends for living expenses
• Health insurance
• Career services and support
• Access to a worldwide alumni network
• A Social Entrepreneurship Fund, described as an initiative for Scholars who are enterprising and want to start a venture back on the continent

That is a broad package by any standard. It is unusual for a scholarship to name accommodation, food, flights and immigration support alongside tuition rather than leaving a student to find those costs themselves.

Here is the honest caveat, and you should hear it from a blog rather than discover it in Vancouver. The programme does not publish exact figures for the stipend, the room and board allowance or the flight allowance on its public pages. Comprehensive is a description of scope, not a number you can budget against. Once you receive an offer, ask the programme office in writing for the specific amounts, what the stipend is expected to cover, and what remains your own responsibility. Vancouver is an expensive city, and knowing the figure before you arrive is worth more than any assumption you can make now.

The Social Entrepreneurship Fund deserves a second look too. Very few scholarships attach seed support for a venture back home. If you already have a business idea rooted in your community, that is a thread worth pulling through your personal statement, because it speaks directly to what this programme says it wants.

Also Check: Erasmus Mundus Scholarships 2027 (Fully Funded Joint Masters in Europe)

How Scholars are chosen, and what the four pillars mean for your writing

Selection is based on four things:

• Academic merit strong enough to qualify for admission to the chosen programme
• A track record as a transformative leader and service within the community
• Quality of the application and how well it aligns with the programme theme
• Potential impact on the development of the applicant’s home country

Notice that only the first of those is about grades. Three of the four are about what you have done for other people and what you intend to do next. That balance is unusual, and it is good news for applicants whose transcripts are solid rather than spectacular but whose community record is real.

The programme organises its work around four pillars, and reading them tells you what language the selection committee thinks in:

• Access and thrive, with attention to marginalised populations, particularly women, refugees, displaced persons and people with disabilities
• Community engaged learning, meaning experiential education aimed at social and environmental challenges
• Dignified and fulfilling work, supported through academic and social programmes
• Agency and voice, meaning hands on learning that builds skills for employment or entrepreneurship

Use those ideas honestly. Do not paste the pillars into your statement as a list. Instead, show one specific thing you did that a reader would recognise as community engaged learning or as building agency for someone else, and let them draw the connection. Specifics travel. A named project, a number of people reached, a problem you failed at and fixed, all of these beat a paragraph of ambition every time.

And write about returning. The entire partnership is framed around graduates contributing to economic growth and social transformation in their communities in Africa. An application that reads as a plan to emigrate permanently is arguing against the thing that funds it.

Also Check: DAAD STEM Master’s Scholarship in Germany 2027

Mistakes that quietly sink applications

None of these are about talent. They are about process, and every one of them is avoidable.

• Letting referees email their letters. The instruction is to attach them to the application and specifically not to email them
• Submitting without applying the fee waiver, which the programme says it cannot refund
• Treating the deadline for the faculty application as flexible. It is not
• Leaving the English test until September when your degree was not taught in English
• Choosing the wrong expression of interest stream
• Writing one personal statement and reusing it across unrelated scholarships, so the specific UBC programmes and the return to community focus never appear
• Applying for a Master’s programme that is not on the eligible list and hoping for an exception

One more thing, and it applies to every scholarship you will ever see. Nobody should be charging you to submit this application on your behalf. There is no agent with a special channel into UBC, no fast track, no guaranteed placement. The official route runs through the programme’s own website at https://mcfscholars.ubc.ca and questions go to scholars.admissions@ubc.ca. If someone asks for a payment to secure you a Mastercard Foundation scholarship, that is a scam, and the only correct response is to walk away.

A three week preparation plan you can start today

If you are reading this on or near 18 August 2026, here is how to use the time before the form opens.

This week:

• Confirm you meet every eligibility point, especially the age rule and the no existing Master’s rule
• Pick your programme from the eligible list and read its own admissions page properly
• Request official transcripts from every institution you attended, since this is the slowest item on the list
• Book an English test if your degree was not taught in English

Next week:

• Ask two referees, in person or on a call rather than by message, and send each of them your draft statement, the programme link and the deadline
• Make it explicit that they must return the signed letter on letterhead to you, not email it to UBC
• Draft your personal statements and put them aside for two days before rewriting

The week the form opens, from 31 August:

• Open the correct stream form on day one, not day five
• Complete the expression of interest and submit it well before 6 September 2026
• Save copies of everything you submitted, including screenshots of confirmation pages

Frequently asked questions

I started a Master’s degree but never finished it. Does that disqualify me?

The published rule is that you must not already possess a Master’s degree, which is written around holding the qualification rather than having studied at that level. Unfinished or abandoned postgraduate study is not addressed on the page. Because this is the kind of detail that gets decided case by case, email scholars.admissions@ubc.ca with your exact situation well before 6 September 2026 rather than submitting and hoping. Keep the reply.

I was born in 1990. Am I inside the age limit or outside it?

You are sitting exactly on the boundary, and the two ways the rule is phrased do not resolve identically for someone in your position. Depending on your birthday and the date you submit, the age test and the birth year guide can point different ways. Anyone born in 1990 should write to the programme office with their date of birth and ask for confirmation in writing before spending three weeks on the application, because this is not a detail to discover after an interview.

Does submitting the expression of interest mean I get to apply for the scholarship?

No, and this is the part applicants misjudge most often. The expression of interest is a screening stage. The Round 1 scholarship application is described as being for eligible candidates, and the programme’s own timeline calls that stage an invitation to apply. So the expression of interest is a gate, not a registration form. Treat the short answers on it as seriously as you would the full application, because for many people that form is the only thing the programme ever reads.

Is this the same as the Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program at other universities, and can I apply to more than one?

It is the same foundation working through a network of partner universities, but each partner runs its own version. Eligible degrees, age rules, deadlines, streams and selection processes are set by the host institution, so the UBC criteria on this page apply only to UBC. Nothing you submit here transfers to another partner university, and applying to one does not register you with another. If you are considering several, treat each as a separate application with its own calendar and check the eligible programme list at each one before you invest time.

Can my spouse or children come with me to Vancouver?

The programme’s public pages do not address dependants, accommodation for families, or whether the room and board provision extends beyond the Scholar. Do not assume either way. If you have a family, ask the programme office directly before you accept an offer, and ask about both the funding side and the immigration side, since those are separate questions with separate answers. Canadian study permit rules for accompanying family members change from time to time, so verify the current position rather than relying on what someone told you a few years ago.