The OFID Scholarship Is Not Open. Here Is What the OPEC Fund Actually Says.
Search for the OFID Scholarship Award today and you will find dozens of pages telling you to apply, several of them with confident deadlines attached.
Now read what the OPEC Fund itself publishes on its own scholarship page:
“The OPEC Fund is currently restructuring its scholarship program and is not accepting applications at this time.”
That is the whole situation. The page gives no value, no eligibility criteria, no deadline and no application steps. It points readers towards the organization’s internship programme instead.
So there is nothing to apply to right now, and a student who spends three weeks assembling documents for it has lost three weeks.
We would rather tell you that in the first paragraph than sell you a deadline.
What it offered before the pause
The scholarship has a real history, and knowing what it was tells you whether it is worth watching for a return.
In previous cycles it provided, according to published summaries of those rounds:
- Full tuition and supplementary institutional fees
- A monthly living allowance
- One round-trip economy airfare
- Health insurance
- A relocation grant
One year of master’s study. Not a PhD, not an undergraduate degree.
At any accredited university in the world. That part made it unusual. Most scholarships tie you to one country or one institution; this one funded you wherever you won a place.
For nationals of developing countries, in development-related fields, development economics, poverty reduction, energy and sustainable development, environmental science, desertification studies and related areas.
Age 23 to 32 at the time of application, with a bachelor’s degree completed or close to it, and a minimum GPA of 3.0 on a 4.0 scale or equivalent.
Published summaries of past rounds also list excluded nationalities, Algeria, Ecuador, Gabon, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Venezuela. Pakistan, India and Bangladesh did not appear on that list.
Treat all of the above as history, not as current terms. The OPEC Fund publishes none of it today, and an organization restructuring a programme usually changes the rules. When it reopens, read the new criteria rather than this paragraph.
Why so many sites still say apply now
This is worth understanding, because it will happen to you again with other scholarships.
Most scholarship websites do not check. They copy an old post, change the year in the title from 2025 to 2026 to 2027, and republish. Traffic arrives, nobody verifies, and the page keeps earning for years after the scholarship itself stopped existing.
A deadline in a headline costs nothing to invent and brings clicks. Checking the funder’s own page takes four minutes and sometimes kills the article.
That is the entire reason an out-of-date scholarship can stay “open” online for years.
The four checks, before you spend a week on anything
Use these on every scholarship you ever read about, including the ones we write about.
One. Open the funder’s own website. Not a blog, not a Facebook post, not an aggregator. The organization that pays the money. If you cannot find their page, that is itself an answer.
Two. Find the application portal, not the description page. A programme page can sit online unchanged for years. A live portal either accepts registrations or it does not.
Three. Look for a date on the page itself. When was it last updated? A page describing a 2027 opportunity that was last touched in 2023 tells you something.
Four. Email them. Most funders answer within a week, and a one-line reply from the organization beats every blog on the internet, this one included.
Those four checks take fifteen minutes and they have saved our readers entire application seasons.
What to do instead
If OFID attracted you because you want a funded master’s in development, economics, energy or environment, the routes below are open or run on predictable cycles.
For a fully funded master’s, the Chinese Government Scholarship through CSC covers a wide range of fields and universities, and Türkiye Bursları needs no language test and no admission letter to apply.
For China-focused policy and leadership study, Schwarzman Scholars runs a funded year at Tsinghua, and the Yenching Academy a two-year master’s at Peking University.
If a doctorate is your real goal, stop looking for scholarships altogether and start reading job adverts. Across Europe a PhD is salaried employment with no tuition fee our ORFeus guide, DTU Denmark post and Örebro guide explain how that works.
And if Hong Kong interests you, the Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme takes any nationality with no age limit.
How you will know if OFID returns
The OPEC Fund says it is restructuring rather than ending the programme, so a return is possible.
Watch opecfund.org directly, under its special initiatives section. Check it two or three times a year rather than daily.
We will update this page the day the OPEC Fund changes its wording, and we will say on the page which date we checked. If you find it open before we do, tell us and we will verify it the same day.
Until then: it is closed, and anyone telling you otherwise has not looked.