Development Ratings

Scholarship grants are awarded after weeding out those with insufficient academic or English skills and after the Trustees have made careful consideration of two application essays. One of the essays is biographical and the other (which must be hand written to avoid a ‘cut and paste’ approach) outlines the applicant’s future hopes and plans. This method provides revealing insights into the applicant’s abilities as well as their commitment to democracy. In addition to this, background checks in conjunction with the OSI help ensure that students in sympathy with the military regime are not granted awards. In years when there are increased resources available, the general policy is to increase the overall number of grants awarded (although this depends on the quality of applications), as well as the level of individual grants. The refugee support projects are funded on an annual basis. Charitable income varies a good deal, as is often the case with small charities, but staff are working on ways to encourage regular donations, such as through an Adopt-a-Scholarship direct debit payment scheme.

In addition to wanting to have the resources to award more scholarships annually to benefit more students, the charity would like to establish an alumni placement scheme, to find short-term work placements its scholars. It would like to be more pro-active in helping talented Burmese find appropriate degree courses (as opposed to the student receiving a course offer first). However, neither of these is currently possible due to the labour-intensive and costly nature of the administrative work involved.