When a Sudanese applicant opened her email from the Chevening Scholarships programme last week, she expected details about the next stage of her application. Instead, she received a rejection.

The message informed her that “due to new UK Government legislation”, Sudanese nationals would no longer be able to obtain study visas for the 2026-2027 academic year.

As a result, her Chevening Scholarship application had been terminated and her interview cancelled.

The student, who asked not to be named for safety reasons, shared the email with The Africa Report.

She had spent months preparing her application – writing essays, gathering academic records and securing references – in the hope of studying in the UK.

The scholarship, she explains, represented both a professional opportunity and a chance to continue her education away from a country devastated by war. Now, that opportunity has disappeared overnight.

“I understand countries have immigration rules,” she says. “But it feels like we are being punished simply for where we come from.”

Her experience is now being echoed by other Sudanese scholarship applicants whose applications have abruptly stalled following the UK government’s new visa restrictions.

A controversial visa crackdown

Britain’s decision to stop issuing student visas to nationals from Sudan and Cameroon is facing mounting criticism from migration experts and humanitarian analysts, who say the policy risks punishing some of the most vulnerable students while doing little to address the political pressures driving the country’s migration debate.

I understand countries have immigration rules, but it feels like we are being punished simply for where we come from

The UK government last week announced it would no longer issue education visas to applicants from Sudan and Cameroon, extending similar restrictions already imposed on Afghanistan and Myanmar.

The Home Office said the move was part of a broader effort to curb asylum claims by people who enter the country through legal routes such as student visas before later applying for protection.

Officials say asylum applications from students from the four countries have surged in recent years.

According to the Home Office, the number of such claims increased by more than 470% between 2021 and 2025, a trend ministers say demonstrates that parts of the student visa system are being used as a pathway to asylum.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood described the decision as an “unprecedented” measure designed to protect the integrity of Britain’s immigration system.

“Britain will always provide refuge to people fleeing war and persecution, but our visa system must not be abused,” Mahmood said.

“That is why I am taking the unprecedented decision to refuse visas for those nationals seeking to exploit our generosity.”

‘Short-sighted politics’

However, critics argue that targeting specific nationalities risks turning migration policy into a blunt political instrument, shaped more by domestic political pressure than by coherent migration management.

“This is yet another example of the UK’s empty, symbolic, and short-sighted politics,” says Loren B. Landau, a senior migration researcher at Oxford University and the University of the Witwatersrand.

While some applicants may overstay visas or later seek asylum, Landau says that behaviour is far from unique to students from Africa or conflict-affected countries.

“While people from Cameroon or Sudan may well violate visa restrictions, so too do Americans, Irish, and other Europeans,” he tells The Africa Report.

“Singling out specific countries will do little to address whatever fabricated migration crisis worries the Labour government.”

Instead, Landau argues, such measures risk reinforcing narratives that have increasingly shaped Britain’s migration politics.

“It amplifies the racism and isolation already emanating from the far right,” he adds.

Divine Fuh, a Cameroonian-born social anthropologist at the University of Cape Town and director of the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA), argues that targeting specific nationalities risks reinforcing deeper historical inequalities in global mobility.

“Under international law people have the right to seek asylum,” he says. “But singling out nationalities is prejudice – if you will allow me to say it plainly, racist.”

For Fuh, the decision also reflects what he sees as unresolved colonial responsibilities in global migration systems. “Countries like the UK, whose fortunes were built through colonialism, should also accept responsibility in building a more equitable global community where people can move without these kinds of prejudices.”

A political response to migration pressures

The number of asylum seekers arriving through irregular routes, particularly small boats crossing the English Channel, has dominated headlines and fuelled pressure on successive governments to tighten immigration controls.

Britain will always provide refuge to people fleeing war and persecution, but our visa system must not be abused

At the same time, official statistics show that a growing share of asylum applicants first enter Britain legally, including on student, visitor or work visas.

In 2025, nearly 40% of asylum applicants had initially arrived through such legal routes, a statistic frequently cited by the authorities seeking to justify tighter visa scrutiny.

For the government, the new restrictions are intended to close what officials see as a loophole in the system.

Critics say the policy risks sweeping up legitimate students, including scholarship recipients, in the process, undermining one of the few legal pathways available to young people from countries facing conflict or political instability.

Conflicts closing classrooms

Sudan presents a particularly stark example. Since April 2023, the country has been engulfed in a devastating war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.

The conflict has displaced millions and triggered what the United Nations describes as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

For many young Sudanese, scholarships abroad have become one of the few viable routes to continue their education while escaping a collapsing state.

British journalist Lindsey Hilsum, international editor at Channel 4 News, says the visa restrictions send a troubling signal at a time when Britain claims to support Sudan’s recovery.

“Students from Sudan, through no fault of their own, are now banned from the UK,” Hilsum wrote on X.

“This, while Yvette Cooper, our Foreign Secretary, says she is campaigning for girls and women in Sudan and an end to the war. It’s a cruel policy that will harm Sudan’s best and brightest.”

Hilsum, who has written extensively about Sudan, recently travelled to the country and reported from there more than a year after the conflict began.

Sudanese political analyst Kholood Khair, founder of the Khartoum-based think tank Confluence Advisory, says the policy exposes contradictions in Britain’s Sudan policy.

“The UK government has a schizophrenic approach to Sudan,” she says. On the one hand, you have a foreign secretary who has made Sudan a core part of her brief, visiting Sudanese refugees in Chad and launching an atrocity-prevention coalition on Sudan. On the other hand, the home secretary is penalising the entire country and undermining its potential because of a very small number of Sudanese who have sought refuge.”

Khair argues the numbers involved are marginal in the broader asylum debate. “Compared to other nationalities, the number of Sudanese asylum claims is practically a rounding error,” she says.

Locking out students

Cameroon, meanwhile, has been grappling with its own prolonged political and security crisis.

Fighting between government forces and separatist groups in the country’s Anglophone regions has displaced hundreds of thousands of people and disrupted education across large parts of the country.

“For many students in the Anglophone regions, education has become another casualty of the conflict,” says Sam Mbeng, a former teacher and activist from the southwestern town of Buea.

“Schools shut down for months, universities are disrupted, and families live with constant insecurity. Scholarships abroad are often the only realistic chance young people have to continue their education.”

Critics say the UK visa restrictions risk shutting down that route for some of the most academically talented students from Sudan and Cameroon at precisely the moment they need it most.

Britain’s reliance on Sudanese professionals

Humanitarian experts say the UK policy also highlights a deeper contradiction in Britain’s long-standing relationship with Sudanese professionals.

Pamela DeLargy, a humanitarian worker who has spent decades dedicated to refugee and displacement issues, says Britain has historically benefited from Sudan’s skilled diaspora – particularly in the health sector.

“This is truly abominable,” she says. “The UK has benefited from Sudanese brain drain for decades. The NHS could not function without Sudanese doctors.”

Blocking student visas now, she argues, amounts to punishing individuals who are already facing extraordinary hardship.

“Why would the UK punish these students who are already suffering? It is cruel,” DeLargy says.

Sudanese medical professionals have long played a significant role in Britain’s healthcare system.

Thousands have trained or worked in the UK over the past several decades, forming one of the largest African professional diasporas in the country.

Critics say the new visa restrictions risk undermining those long-standing educational and professional ties.

The decision has also sparked concern among Sudanese academics and civil society groups. In an open letter addressed to Prime Minister Keir Starmer and several senior ministers, a coalition of Sudanese and international scholars condemned the visa policy as discriminatory and legally questionable.

The letter argues that denying student visas based on the assumption that applicants might later seek asylum amounts to what the authors describe as “preemptive discrimination”.

“Current Home Office practices effectively penalise Sudanese students for their potential future status rather than their current academic qualifications,” the signatories wrote.

Culled from The Africa Report