Qatar donates $4.3 million to Oxford University's Thatcher Scholarship

The Qatar Development Fund has donated $4.3 million to the Margaret Thatcher Scholarship Trust at the prestigious Oxford University, it was announced this week.

The donation was said to be aimed at funding the tuition and accommodation costs of "outstanding" students, especially those from Qatar and other Arab states, at the university's Somerville College.

Somerville College founded the trust in 2013, which is named after and the late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who once studied at the college.

The trust will fund students who were, like Thatcher, of "modest financial backgrounds" and were able to "overcome adversity in some form, as she did," college principal Alice Prochaska said.

The new "Qatar Thatcher Scholarships" will no doubt have no shortage of applications from outstanding Arab students who have overcome various obstacles.

But the agreement itself highlights an often unnoticed trend occurring across the Arab world, namely, the large number of Arab graduates educated in western universities.

Large co-operation programmes between Arab, notably Gulf states including Qatar, and western universities have become a set feature of the last decade.

Aside from major donations by Gulf states for specific programmes, external campuses of universities like UCL and Georgetown have sprung up across Gulf Arab states over the past years.

More significant however are the tens of thousands of Arab students sent abroad every year as part of these new academic relations.

Saudi Arabia's funding programme alone saw more than 10,000 Saudi students sent to western institutions to study a variety of disciplines since 2005.

Qatar and the Emirates confirmed the pattern, naturally with smaller student numbers, while pre-2011 Libya and Egypt saw similar trends.