PhD Funding for Refugees and Displaced Students (2026)

Most PhD funding guides, including most of the ones on this site, assume a fairly standard applicant path: undergraduate degree, direct or near-direct progression to graduate study, a stable set of transcripts and references. That path doesn't describe every applicant. A genuine, growing set of dedicated funding programs exists specifically for students whose education was disrupted by conflict, persecution, or displacement, and almost none of that funding shows up in general scholarship lists, because it's administered through a different channel entirely: university sanctuary programs rather than national scholarship boards.

DAFI: the largest dedicated refugee scholarship, but not for PhD level

UNHCR's DAFI programme, the Albert Einstein German Academic Refugee Initiative, is worth knowing about first because it's the most established name in this space: it's UNHCR's longest-running and largest standalone higher education scholarship program specifically for refugees, running for more than three decades and supporting more than 27,200 young refugees toward undergraduate degrees. It's funded primarily through the German government, with additional support from Denmark and private partners, and it covers tuition and fees along with associated costs like housing, transport, materials, and food. The honest limitation for a PhD applicant specifically is that DAFI is built for undergraduate study, not doctoral funding, so it's a program worth knowing about and worth confirming current details on directly with UNHCR, but not a realistic direct funding source for a PhD.

University-run "sanctuary" scholarships: the real PhD-level route

A number of individual universities, concentrated heavily in the UK, run their own dedicated sanctuary or displaced-student scholarship programs, and several of these do reach PhD level directly:

• Loughborough University's Sanctuary PhD Scholarships offer fully funded doctoral opportunities specifically for students whose education and life opportunities have been disrupted by conflict, persecution, displacement, or insecurity, open to both UK and international applicants across multiple start dates.
• University of Oxford's Refugee Academic Futures Scholarships support graduate study, including doctoral study, for students who are refugees or have lived experience of displacement, covering course fees and a living-cost grant for the full duration of fee liability.
• Imperial College London's Postgraduate Sanctuary Scholarship is aimed at Master's-level study rather than PhD directly, but is worth knowing about as a stepping stone: it covers full tuition fees, a stipend of around £22,000 a year, a one-time equipment grant, and English-test, visa, and NHS surcharge costs, a genuinely complete funding package for the degree that often precedes a funded PhD application.
• University of Reading's Sanctuary Scholarships span foundation, undergraduate, and postgraduate levels, illustrating how these programs vary in exactly which degree levels they fund, check each university's specific scheme rather than assuming PhD-level funding is included by default.

This list isn't exhaustive, and new sanctuary scholarship programs are launched by individual universities regularly, searching a specific target university's own website for "sanctuary scholarship" or "displaced students scholarship" is worth doing directly rather than relying only on a third-party list, since these programs are run and funded independently by each institution.

CARA and Scholars at Risk: mostly for established academics, not new applicants

The Council for At-Risk Academics (Cara), founded in 1933 originally to assist academics fleeing the Nazi regime, and Scholars at Risk, a similar network operating in the US and internationally, are worth understanding clearly for what they actually do: relocate and support academics who are already in danger, established researchers, lecturers, and scholars, rather than fund students beginning a doctorate from scratch. They're genuinely relevant if you're an early-career researcher or recent graduate whose academic career was directly disrupted by conflict or persecution, and worth reaching out to directly to ask whether your specific situation fits, but for most applicants starting a PhD, a university's own sanctuary scholarship program is the more directly applicable route.

What a genuinely complete sanctuary package tends to include

Where a university sanctuary scholarship does reach the level of the Imperial College and Oxford programs described above, the package is generally built to be more comprehensive than a typical merit scholarship, recognizing that a displaced applicant usually can't fall back on family savings, a home-country loan, or employer sponsorship the way many other international applicants can. Beyond tuition and a living stipend, genuinely complete packages have included one-time equipment grants for a laptop and basic study materials, and coverage of costs that are otherwise easy to underestimate: English-language proficiency test fees, visa application costs, and, in the UK specifically, the immigration health surcharge that every visa applicant is otherwise required to pay upfront. Comparing offers on this fuller list, not just the headline tuition-and-stipend figure, is worth doing before assuming two "fully funded" sanctuary offers are actually equivalent.

Eligibility documentation: check each program individually

These programs don't share one universal definition of who qualifies, and that's worth planning around rather than assuming. Some require formal UNHCR refugee registration, others accept a broader range of documentation, an asylum application in the host country, a status letter, or a personal statement describing displacement circumstances. Reading each specific scholarship's eligibility page closely, rather than assuming eligibility carries over from one program's definition to another's, avoids wasted time applying to a program you don't actually qualify for and missing one you do.

The document problem: applying without full access to your own records

A practical obstacle that generic PhD application advice doesn't account for at all: displaced applicants frequently can't access complete transcripts, degree certificates, or identity documents from an institution or country they were forced to leave, sometimes because the institution itself was disrupted, sometimes because returning to request records isn't safe. This is worth raising directly and early with both the university's admissions office and the specific sanctuary scholarship program, most have some experience with alternative documentation processes, sworn statements, partial records combined with other evidence of prior study, or a formal credential evaluation service's own alternative-documentation procedure, precisely because this situation comes up regularly for this applicant population. Don't assume a missing transcript disqualifies an application before actually asking the program directly how it handles the situation, university sanctuary programs are generally the most experienced in the entire admissions system at working around exactly this problem.

Finding programs beyond this list

Because sanctuary scholarships are run independently by individual universities rather than through one central body, new ones appear and existing ones change their terms fairly often. A few practical ways to keep searching beyond what's listed here: check a specific target university's graduate admissions or financial aid pages directly for "sanctuary," "displaced students," or "refugee scholarship" language, since many universities that run these programs list them prominently once you're on the right page even if they don't surface in general scholarship search engines. National refugee-support organizations and university refugee-student support offices, where they exist, often maintain their own updated lists specific to that country's universities as well, worth checking alongside a direct university search rather than relying on either source alone.

Why direct outreach to a professor still matters here

For sanctuary scholarships not already tied to a specific supervisor, having a professor in your target field who's willing to take you on strengthens the application the same way it does for any other PhD funding route, a scholarship committee reviewing a sanctuary application is generally more confident funding a candidate who already has a specific, engaged supervisor lined up than one applying without any named research fit. Our guide to the exact email structure that gets replies covers how to reach out to a specific professor, and our guide to sponsorship options for African postgraduate students covers a related set of funding mechanisms worth knowing about alongside sanctuary scholarships specifically.

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