Scholarships without a plan

From 2012 to 2018 Gabon’s national scholarship agency (ANBG) published the list of its decisions every year. We reconstruct from those lists, as archived by the Internet Archive, a base of 210,175 decisions concerning 78,539 students, without names, and follow each student from one year to the next through a fingerprint of their scholarship number. The number of funded students rises from 18,239 in 2012–2013 to 36,336 in 2016–2017; published figures later put it around 25,000 in 2022–2023, for 80 billion FCFA. We compare that effort with the needs the following decade revealed.

A decade later, too many graduates where there are no jobs, too few where the country is short. In 2024 higher-education graduates are the group most exposed to unemployment (25.6%, against 17.4% overall) and only 26.7% of those working hold a formal job; at the same time the country lacks doctors (0.5 per 1,000 inhabitants), science teachers and technicians, to the point that firms exceed their foreign-labour quotas.

The scholarships went elsewhere. The fields in shortage (health, education, science, engineering, computing, agriculture and forestry) received only 24% of scholarships over the period, and their share fell from 28% in 2012–2013 to 24% in 2017–2018; only health rose. Among new entrants the share is 22%, with no upward trend. Scholarships were long (5.3 years on average for students who entered before 2013, estimated) and changes of field rare (13% in the 2013 cohort).

Planning would have trained far more of the graduates the country needed, at the same cost. Simulating the 2013–2022 cohorts under other allocation rules at equal budget: reserving 40% of new scholarships for the fields in shortage would have produced about 24,700 graduates there by 2025 instead of 14,900; costing the needs would have closed the shortage of doctors (about 1,160 in 2022), which the observed scholarships covered only by half; capping the duration of scholarships would have freed enough to train 18,900 more.

Keywordsstudy scholarships · higher education · skills planning · graduate unemployment · ANBG · Gabon

The source. The ANBG site published the decisions of its technical commission: scholarship number, country of study, category, institution, discipline, decision (granted for a period, refused, withdrawn for failure, end of cycle, dropped out). The Internet Archive kept 529 dated copies between 2013 and 2021; the last complete list is of 26 February 2018, after which the page became a search engine the archive could not capture. There is no public list after 2017–2018.

Anonymisation. Neither names nor banks are kept. The scholarship number is replaced by a salted cryptographic fingerprint that recognises the same student from one list to the next without allowing the number to be recovered. From 2013 the number also carries the cohort.

Fields and trajectories. Disciplines are mapped to ISCED-F 2013 fields; the fields in shortage are those the following decade’s evidence names. Each cohort is followed year by year: still funded, withdrawn, gone from the lists, changed field. The preparatory class of the Lycée Léon-Mba is followed into the French engineering schools its students go on to.

Simulation. For cohorts 2013–2022 and each field, entrants, the share funded to the end of the normal duration, the scholarship-years consumed and the share abroad (where a year costs about ten times more) give the graduates by 2025 and the cost of each cohort. Five allocation rules redistribute entrants while keeping each cohort’s cost equal to the observed one; 300 resamplings give 90% intervals.

Read withOrders of magnitude. The lists stop in 2018; unemployment is known by level of education, not by discipline; a disappearance from the lists is not a diploma; fields are inferred from codes without a published ANBG reference; the duration-cap result rests on estimated seniority and is the most fragile.

1. Cour des comptes du Gabon. Rapport au Président de la République 2018, audit of the ANBG (2011–2018), pp. 64–65.
2. INSTAT and Direction générale de l'emploi. Enquête nationale sur l'emploi et le chômage 2024, tables 21, 24, 28 and 29, presented 29 April 2026.
3. World Bank. Gabon Public Finance Review 2026, September 2026 (health workforce).
4. World Bank. World Development Indicators: population (SP.POP.TOTL) and physicians per 1,000 people (SH.MED.PHYS.ZS), accessed 15 October 2026.
5. Gabon Media Time. L'enseignement secondaire en déficit de 300 professeurs de mathématiques; Le360 Afrique, Pénurie de profs dans des classes de 130 élèves, November 2024.
6. Gabon Media Time and Gabonreview on foreign-labour quotas and national preference, 2024.
7. L'Union, 10 August 2016 (scholarship allocations, 38 to 59 billion FCFA, 2009–2015); L'Union, 9 July 2024, ANBG : incohérences et incongruités (year 2022–2023).
8. Gabonactu, 5 August 2023: En 10 ans, l'ANBG a payé 291 061 bourses d'études.
9. Internet Archive. Captures of anbg.ga, 2013–2021 (529 dated copies).