WAEMU's excellence scholarships: a policy of belonging

The call for applications for the WAEMU Excellence Scholarship Programme for training and research, 2026-2029 edition, closed on 30 August¹. The event drew little attention in Europe, and that is a mistake. Few instruments say as much, with so little money, about what a regional organisation is trying to do — and about what it can actually do — when it sets out to manufacture integration through higher education. Our aim here is to show that this programme, modest in scale, is significant in design, and that its principal condition of award — studying within the Union — makes it less an education policy than a policy of belonging. Nor is the detour through West Africa a detour at all for anyone interested in European construction: it is the same problem, posed elsewhere, with other means.

A word of context is in order, because the West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA/WAEMU) remains little known to the European public even though it is, of all the world’s regional organisations, the one most faithfully modelled on the Community template. Founded by the Treaty of Dakar in 1994, it brings together eight states — Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo — around a common currency, the CFA franc, whose parity is pegged to the euro². It has a Commission established in Ouagadougou, a common central bank in Dakar, a court of justice, a body of secondary law made up of regulations and directives, and its own funding drawn from a community solidarity levy on imports³. The architecture is so deliberately European that the Union amounts to a kind of natural experiment: what becomes of the Community model when it is transplanted into a space where eight of the world’s least wealthy economies share a currency without sharing, or barely, anything else? The answer, for thirty years, fits in a single formula: integration by texts has run far ahead of integration by facts. Regulations pile up, intra-community trade remains weak, and the Union remains, for most of its citizens, a monetary abstraction. It is precisely this gap that makes the programme before us worth examining.

The facts first, because they are precise. The programme selects, in each of the eight member states, ten deserving students — eighty laureates per edition — to undertake a bachelor’s degree, a master’s, a doctorate or a postdoctoral specialisation in human health⁴. The scholarship covers tuition fees and includes an installation allowance of 200,000 CFA francs, annual health insurance of the same amount, a monthly allowance of 150,000 CFA francs and, for courses followed outside the country of residence, return air tickets⁵. The CFA franc’s peg to the euro makes the conversion exact: approximately €229 a month, €305 on installation — amounts which, measured against the cost of living in the region’s capitals, give a student genuine material autonomy. The scheme falls under the implementation of the Union’s revised Treaty and its “Impact 2030” strategic plan for 2025-2030⁶; the 2026-2029 edition follows that of 2025-2028, which suggests a logic of annual cohorts intended to overlap⁷. Two rules complete the picture and speak volumes: the scholarship cannot be combined with any other, and online courses are not eligible⁸. The Union funds presences, not enrolments.

Everything, however, hangs on a single clause: the course must be followed at an institution “duly established on the territory of the Union”⁹. On first reading, the restriction looks administrative. It is in fact the political heart of the programme, and it operates on two fronts at once.

The first front is retention. For a brilliant school-leaver from Ouagadougou, Cotonou or Bamako, the trajectory of excellence has historically had one name: leaving. To France first, whose universities remain the natural horizon of a francophone space that inherited its academic structures from them; to North America next, where scientific careers are pursued. This geography of merit is no accident: it is the product of decades of scholarship policies — national, bilateral, philanthropic — which funded the departure of the best in the hope of their return, and which most often organised, in practice, their settlement elsewhere. The phenomenon has long been documented for the health professions, where West African systems train, at great expense, doctors who then practise in European hospitals. One then grasps the significance of WAEMU’s choice: the programme pays for excellence on condition that it stays — not in the country of origin, which would be just one more national scholarship, but within the regional space. A Togolese can study in Dakar, a Nigerien in Abidjan, a Bissau-Guinean in Lomé. It is a policy against the brain drain that does not say its name, and that proceeds by incentive rather than lamentation. The targeting of postdoctoral specialisation in human health, the only field the call names explicitly, should be read in the same light: that is where the haemorrhage is most costly, and where the local training of specialists is most sorely lacking¹⁰.

The second front is belonging, and it is here that the European mirror becomes genuinely instructive. When the European Community launched Erasmus in 1987, the programme involved barely more than three thousand students; the stated objective was academic, the intended effect — achieved beyond all expectation — was identitarian¹¹. Successive generations of students turned Europe into a lived experience rather than a legal abstraction, to the point that the “Erasmus generation” has become a commonplace of European discourse, and one of the few achievements of Community construction whose popularity has never flagged. WAEMU’s wager is rigorously the same, transposed: a Beninese student trained at the university of Saint-Louis in Senegal makes the Union exist in a way the banknotes in his pocket never could. He experiences its reality — free movement, the equivalence of degree courses, a shared academic language — and he becomes, whether he wishes it or not, one of its artisans. The wager rests, moreover, on a foundation older than the Union itself: since 1968 the West African space has had, in CAMES — the African and Malagasy Council for Higher Education (created 1968) — a common mechanism for recognising degrees and academic careers, and it has generalised the licence-master-doctorate (LMD) structure that makes curricula comparable from one country to the next¹². The infrastructure of mobility exists; the scholarship programme comes to anchor trajectories to it.

Except that — and the difference is considerable — Erasmus organises mass mobility where WAEMU singles out an elite. Eighty laureates a year, for a space of more than 130 million inhabitants with one of the youngest populations in the world, does not make a generation; it makes an honours list. One manufactures a shared experience, the other a symbol. And one must ask, honestly, what the symbol is worth.

The answer is not self-evident, for a policy of eighty scholarships obviously does not transform a higher-education system, nor does it aspire to. Its function lies elsewhere, and it seems to us threefold. It is demonstrative, first: the Union proves, on its own budget, that it can reach citizens directly — students, families, universities — without passing through the intermediary of the states. For a regional organisation whose popular legitimacy remains fragile, this direct link is no communications accessory; it is a condition of existence. Regional constructions that touch their citizens only through texts remain arrangements between governments, exposed to those governments’ reversals — the West African space, where three neighbouring states have recently seceded from ECOWAS, offers an immediate illustration. A scholarship paid each month into a student’s account is, at its modest scale, tangible integration. It is structuring, second, at the margin: by directing its laureates towards the region’s institutions, the programme confers on certain university hubs — Dakar, Abidjan, and the rest — a label of regional excellence that may, in time, feed an avowed West African university hierarchy, the condition for the best students to stop assuming that excellence is necessarily found elsewhere. It is experimental, finally: an annual cohort is a format that can be widened if the funding follows, and the succession from one edition to the next suggests that the WAEMU Commission intends precisely to entrench the scheme for the long term.

The limits are real, and they must be named with the same clarity. Scale, first: ten scholarships per country belong to individual distinction more than to public policy, and the contrast is striking between the ambition of the gesture and the modesty of the number. Absorption capacity, next: steering excellence towards the region’s universities presupposes that they can receive it — equipped laboratories, available doctoral supervision, well-stocked libraries — failing which retention becomes a ceiling, and the scholarship an assignment. The programme wagers that supply will follow the demand it creates; that is a wager, not a guarantee. Meritocratic selectivity, again: a programme of excellence by construction rewards those who have already passed every filter of a deeply unequal education system, and one may ask whether regional integration is decided in the trajectories of its top-of-the-class students or in those, incomparably more massive, of ordinary ones. Erasmus, here too, illuminates by contrast: its strength was precisely that it was not a distinction. The risk of circumvention, finally: nothing guarantees that a laureate trained in Abidjan will not emigrate the day after his doctorate. The scholarship retains during the training; it does not bind afterwards. A policy of belonging is judged at twenty years, and at that horizon it will be necessary to count the cohorts that stayed in the region to know whether the instrument produced anything other than award ceremonies.

The fact remains that these limits, precisely because they are visible, trace in negative what is most interesting about the programme: it chooses. It chooses the region over extraversion, presence over enrolment, the direct link over the intermediation of states. These are the choices of an organisation that has understood — perhaps by observing the European experience, whose forms it has so extensively copied — that common currencies and common markets do not suffice to make communities, and that the integration that lasts is the kind embodied in life trajectories. Europe took thirty years to measure what Erasmus had done for it; it would be unfair to ask of WAEMU results that no policy of belonging delivers in the short term. The pertinent question is that of trajectory: if the cohorts widen, if the region’s universities receive the means of their new role, if the label of regional excellence ends up retaining what it distinguishes, then the Union will have begun something that resembles a community. If not, it will have decorated its best students — which is not nothing, but which is not a policy.

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1. WAEMU, “Call for applications for the WAEMU Excellence Scholarship Programme for training and research, 2026-2029 edition”, closing 30 August 2026. ↩

2. Treaty of the West African Economic and Monetary Union, signed in Dakar on 10 January 1994; on the CFA franc’s fixed parity with the euro, see the monetary cooperation agreements linking the zone to France. ↩

3. On the Union’s institutional architecture (the Commission in Ouagadougou, the BCEAO, the Court of Justice) and its funding through the community solidarity levy on imports, see WAEMU’s institutional website. ↩

4. Call 2026-2029, cited above: ten students selected per member state, at bachelor’s, master’s, doctoral and postdoctoral level, the latter in human health. ↩

5. Ibid.: installation allowance of 200,000 CFA francs, annual health insurance of 200,000 CFA francs, monthly allowance of 150,000 CFA francs, coverage of tuition fees and of air tickets for courses followed outside the country of residence. ↩

6. Revised WAEMU Treaty; WAEMU Commission, “Impact 2030” strategic plan 2025-2030. ↩

7. See the call for the previous edition, 2025-2028, published by the WAEMU Commission. ↩

8. Conditions of the 2026-2029 call: scholarship not combinable with any other, online courses not eligible. ↩

9. Ibid. ↩

10. The interpretation of the health targeting is our own; on the emigration of West African health professionals to European systems, the literature is abundant. ↩

11. On the beginnings of Erasmus (1987) and its effects on identity, see the reviews published by the European Commission on the programme’s anniversaries. ↩

12. CAMES — the African and Malagasy Council for Higher Education (created 1968) — provides common recognition of degrees and academic careers across francophone Africa; the WAEMU states have moreover generalised the licence-master-doctorate (LMD) structure. ↩