Chevening and HSA Group to fund two Yemeni students for UK master’s degrees

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LONDON, United Kingdom — Two Yemeni students will study for master’s degrees in Britain under a Chevening scholarship funded by the Yemeni conglomerate HSA Group.

Chevening, the UK government’s international scholarships programme, lists HSA Group as a corporate partner sponsoring two awards for applicants from Yemen.

The awards are fully funded, according to Chevening’s published programme material.

That account rests on Chevening’s own published material and on HSA Group’s profile on the same site. No independent reporting of the partnership has been published, and Yemen Herald could not confirm the number of awards from a second origin.

Candidates may take any Chevening-eligible course at any UK university, provided the subject falls in one of three areas.

Those are artificial intelligence, digital transformation and data-driven governance; economic recovery and private sector development; or food, water and climate resilience.

Chevening funds one-year taught master’s courses.

Applicants who meet a partner’s criteria are considered for its award automatically, the programme says. It advises that no additional step is needed when submitting an application.

Applications for the 2027-2028 cycle close on 6 October 2026 at 11:00 UTC.

Chevening awards are supported by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and by partner organisations.

Chevening describes its purpose as offering “exceptional future leaders the opportunity to further their education in the UK, so that they can drive impact in areas of shared priority for the UK and their home countries.”

It names climate action, economic prosperity and conflict recovery among the fields where it says its network is making a measurable difference.

To apply, candidates must meet the programme’s eligibility criteria, hold an email address and phone number, and keep the access code issued by the online application system, which is required at each stage.

Getting to Britain is harder from Yemen than from most places. There are no UK visa processing centres in the country, so successful applicants must travel abroad to apply.

Applicants meet those travel costs themselves, Chevening says, though scholars may be eligible for a discretionary reimbursement of some of them.

Chevening scholars are required to leave the UK for at least two years after their course, whatever their nationality.

For Yemeni scholars, the programme says applications to return to a third country may be considered in exceptional cases where returning home is impossible because of the conflict.

Chevening also tells applicants that partner awards go unfilled in some years, and that competition for them can be lighter than for the main scheme.

Britain’s ambassador to Yemen, Abda Sharif, welcomed the partnership as a shared commitment to Yemen’s future leaders, Yemeni media reported. The British embassy has published no readout, and Yemen Herald found no independent account of her remarks.

Sharif took up the post in September, succeeding Richard Oppenheim, Arab News reported at the time.

She is a lawyer by training. Before Yemen she headed the Iraq and Arabian Peninsula department in the FCDO’s Middle East and North Africa directorate.

She was deputy ambassador to Lebanon between 2012 and 2016, and led the UK office in Benghazi in 2011.

HSA Group was established in Yemen in 1938 by four brothers of the Saeed Anam family, according to the company profile Chevening publishes.

It is now a diversified conglomerate, and describes itself as one of the largest multinational businesses in the Middle East and North Africa.

The group employs more than 35,000 people and operates in more than 40 markets.

It works with United Nations agencies, among them the World Food Programme and the World Health Organization, on public health, nutrition and food security programmes, the profile says.

The company traces a nearly 85-year history and says its founders worked to a philosophy of doing well by doing good.

It says its values reward compassion, care for others and community spirit in dealings with employees, partners and the societies where it operates.

It is not the company’s first UK education commitment. University College London announced a philanthropic partnership with HSA in March 2024 to support Yemeni students in its Faculty of Engineering Sciences.

That award supports one Yemeni student on an MSc in engineering for international development. It covers tuition in full and contributes towards living costs.

More than half of Yemenis are under twenty-one, HSA’s chairman and chief executive, Abdul Gabbar Hayel Saeed, said when the UCL partnership was announced.

He described HSA as the largest private company in Yemen, and said it intended to keep funding education programmes with international universities.

Nigel Titchener-Hooker, then dean of UCL’s Faculty of Engineering Sciences, said scholarships were “critical to enabling those who have the talent, but not the resources” to study there.

The three eligible subject areas track pressures set out in Yemen’s humanitarian planning.

More than 22 million people in Yemen need humanitarian assistance, according to the Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan published in March 2026.

That plan puts 18.3 million people at acute food insecurity, and more than 2.2 million children under five as acutely malnourished. Of those, 516,157 are severely malnourished.

It counts 5.2 million internally displaced people, and seeks $2.16 billion to reach 12 million.

Yemeni scholars have passed through the programme before. Chevening published an account in February 2026 by the scholar Belques al-Daeri, who wrote about applying diplomacy training to peacebuilding work at home.

The programme maintains an alumni group for Yemen.