SDG 10 · Indicator 10.3.1

International Students from Developing Countries

Metric 10.3 · Proportion of international students from developing countries · 2025

Universitas Islam Internasional Indonesia (UIII) was established by the Government of Indonesia as a graduate-only, English-medium international university with an explicit public mandate: to open world-class postgraduate education to scholars from the Muslim world and the Global South, and to do so on terms that do not depend on the wealth of the student or of the sending country. This mandate places the university squarely within the ambition of UN Target 10.B, which calls for official development assistance and financial flows, including for education, to be directed to the states where the need is greatest, in particular least developed countries and African countries, and of UN Target 10.A, which seeks special and differential treatment for developing countries. For UIII, hosting students from low and lower-middle income economies is not a by-product of international recruitment; it is the institution's reason for existing.

This report presents evidence regarding the proportion of UIII's full-time equivalent (FTE) student body composed of international students who originate from low-income or lower-middle-income economies—as classified by the World Bank—and who receive comprehensive financial aid covering tuition, housing, living expenses, and study materials provided or facilitated by the university. The data draws on the UIII Student Registry for academic year 2025/2026, published admissions and scholarship records, student-life documentation, and the World Bank income classification applicable for 2025.

The target population comprises all master's degree cohorts from 2024 and 2025, alongside doctoral degree cohorts from 2023, 2024, and 2025, excluding students who have completed their studies. Because all postgraduate offerings at UIII operate as full-time, residential programmes with a fixed module load, each enrolled student equals 1.0 Full-Time Equivalence (FTE), establishing a direct 1:1 match between FTE figures and student headcount.

International student status is designated strictly according to the country of citizenship recorded upon initial registration; consequently, Indonesian nationals are excluded from the international cohort. Among the international student body, 24 represented countries fall under the World Bank's 2025 classification for low-income or lower-middle-income economies. Conversely, international students originating from Australia, Mexico, and Türkiye—classified as high-income or upper-middle-income nations—are excluded from the calculated numerator, despite being recipients of UIII scholarships. Finally, the scope of financial aid encompasses only students holding official registry-tracked scholarships funded directly by UIII or administered in partnership with government and donor schemes, including the UIII Scholarship, UIII partial scholarship, PEMRI-UIII, LPDP-UIII, Norway-UIII, and Netherlands-UIII programs. Self-funded students are omitted entirely from these reporting metrics.

Section 1: Student Enrolment

In 2025 UIII enrolled 413 FTE students in its master's and doctoral programmes. Of these, 192 were international students drawn from 27 countries, and 186 were international students from 24 low or lower-middle income countries who studied with scholarship support. International students from developing countries therefore constituted 45.0% of the entire student body and 96.9% of all international students. Given that UIII offers no bachelor's programmes, undergraduate metrics are recorded as not applicable; the proportions below describe a wholly postgraduate population.

Table 1. Proportion of International Students from Developing Countries by Programme Level, 2025. FIS = Faculty of Islamic Studies; FOSS = Faculty of Social Sciences; FEB = Faculty of Economics and Business; FoE = Faculty of Education; FST = Faculty of Science and Technology. Percentages are computed on headcount, which equals FTE.

Table 1 shows a student body in which the developing-country cohort is not a minority but the single largest constituency at master's level, where it accounts for more than half of all enrolments (50.8%). The dominance of the master's ratio reflects the structure of UIII's scholarship offer: the fully funded UIII Scholarship is prioritised for first-time master's applicants and is awarded through a single application that combines admission and funding, so the master's intake is where the university's access policy has its most immediate effect. The doctoral ratio (29.1%) is lower for two structural reasons. Doctoral cohorts are smaller and accumulate across four annual intakes, and a larger share of doctoral places is reserved for Indonesian lecturers funded through the national LPDP endowment, which is part of the university's domestic capacity-building role. Even so, the 32 doctoral candidates from developing countries represent 91.4% of all international doctoral students, which indicates that at the highest level of study the university's international recruitment is almost entirely oriented towards scholars from low and lower-middle income economies.

The effect of these ratios on the academic climate is tangible. With Indonesian and international students sharing classrooms in roughly equal numbers, every seminar at UIII operates as a comparative, cross-regional conversation: a public policy class on climate adaptation brings together students from The Gambia, Pakistan and Java; a classical Islamic studies cohort combines Arabic-medium graduates from Egypt, Morocco and Yemen with Indonesian pesantren graduates. This is the inclusive academic environment that the indicator is designed to reward, and it is produced directly by the enrolment pattern recorded in Table 1.

Table 2. Students from Developing Countries by Faculty and Study Programme, 2025.

The programme-level distribution in Table 2 is strikingly balanced across disciplines: the Faculty of Social Sciences (62 students), the Faculty of Economics and Business (54) and the Faculty of Islamic Studies (47) each host a substantial cohort, followed by Education (18) and the new Faculty of Science and Technology (5). Two features deserve emphasis. First, the largest single programmes, Public Policy specialising in Climate Change (28) and Sustainable Finance (20), address precisely the development challenges that most affect low and lower-middle income economies, so the knowledge acquired at UIII is directly transferable to students' home institutions and governments. Second, the presence of 15 doctoral candidates in Islamic Studies and 8 in Economics shows that the university is building advanced research capacity, not only taught-master's throughput, for the countries concerned.

Figure 1 visualises the composition of the 2025 student body as stacked columns for the master's, doctoral and combined populations. The dark segment in each column represents international students from developing countries who receive financial aid, and its height relative to the full column conveys the proportion at a glance: slightly more than half of the master's column, just under a third of the doctoral column, and 45.0% of the total. The visual also makes clear that the master's level carries the bulk of the absolute numbers (154 of 186), which is consistent with the annual rhythm of UIII's scholarship cycle, in which each new master's intake adds a large, fully funded international cohort. Read against the intake data behind the chart (12 doctoral students from the 2023 intake, 105 students from 2024 and 69 from 2025), the figure reflects a university whose developing-country enrolment has been sustained across successive admission cycles rather than concentrated in a single year, a pattern that points to the stability of the scholarship pipeline and of the pre-departure, arrival and advising systems that enable students to complete their programmes.

Table 3. Country of Origin of International Students from Developing Countries, 2025. All students are enrolled in full degree programmes; UIII did not host short-term or TEEP-type exchange students from these countries in 2025, so no exchange breakdown applies. Gender composition of the 186 students: 133 men and 53 women.

Table 3 reveals both concentration and breadth. Four countries, Pakistan (50), The Gambia (31), Nigeria (28) and Afghanistan (18), together supply 127 students, or 68.3% of the cohort, and each of them contributed students in both the 2024 and 2025 intakes. This anchoring in a few well-established sending countries is the outcome of deliberate institutional relationships: the government-to-government PEMRI-UIII scheme for Afghan students, sustained engagement with the embassies of Pakistan and Nigeria, and the West African network that the university has cultivated through Indonesia's diplomatic missions. Around this core sits a long tail of twenty countries with nine or fewer students each, including six represented by a single student (Palestine, South Sudan, Tunisia, Uganda, Viet Nam, Zambia and Zimbabwe among them). Several of these single-student countries, Egypt at doctoral level, Palestine, South Sudan, Tunisia and Uganda, appear for the first time in the 2025 intake, evidence that outreach has recently widened to new markets.

Viewed regionally, West Africa (79 students, 42.5%) and South Asia (76 students, 40.9%) are almost equal in size and together account for more than four-fifths of the cohort. East and Southern Africa contribute 15 students from seven countries, Southeast Asia 7, North Africa 5 and West Asia 4. Taken together, Africa supplies 99 students, 53.2% of the cohort, which is directly relevant to UN Target 10.B's emphasis on African countries. By income group, the nine low income economies (The Gambia, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Malawi, Yemen, Madagascar, South Sudan and Uganda) send 72 students (38.7%), and the fifteen lower-middle income economies send 114 (61.3%). Twelve of the 24 countries are also on the United Nations list of Least Developed Countries, which means that a substantial part of UIII's scholarship expenditure functions as education-directed development assistance to the economies with the fewest domestic opportunities for advanced study. The diplomatic significance of this geography is equally important: through its alumni, UIII is building a network of scholars, civil servants and educators across the Muslim-majority and Muslim-minority societies of Africa and Asia, which strengthens Indonesia's South-South academic cooperation and gives the sending countries access to a research community they could not otherwise reach.

Section 2: Strategic Admission and Post-Graduation Pathways

UIII's admission architecture is built on the premise that the principal barriers facing candidates from low and lower-middle income countries are financial and procedural rather than intellectual. The university has therefore designed a pathway in which funding, admission and relocation support are handled as a single process, so that a qualified graduate in Freetown, Peshawar or Banjul can move from application to enrolment without needing private resources or an intermediary.

2.1 Scholarship-based admission as the default pathway

The 2025/2026 admission cycle opened on 17 December 2024 and ran to 31 March 2025 through a single online portal. The application is simultaneously an application for the UIII Scholarship, so candidates do not need to search for separate funding, and the selection process (administrative screening, desk review and an online interview, with results sent by e-mail) can be completed entirely from the applicant's home country. In response to strong demand from overseas candidates, the university extended the international deadline from 1 April to 30 April 2025 and allowed late applications to be deferred to the following term, a flexibility that matters for applicants in countries where document authentication and internet access are slow. The application fee of IDR 700,000 or USD 50 may be waived on grounds of financial need.

Language is treated as a bridge rather than a gate. The published English thresholds (master's: TOEFL iBT 80, IELTS 6.5 or PTE 58; doctoral: TOEFL iBT 94, IELTS 7.0 or PTE 65) are waived for graduates of English-medium universities, which covers most applicants from anglophone Africa and South Asia. For the Classical Islam (Turath) track, admission is possible on the strength of Arabic proficiency, which opens a pathway for graduates of traditional religious institutions in Egypt, Morocco, Yemen and Palestine whose first academic language is not English. After enrolment, international students have access to Bahasa Indonesia for Speakers of Other Languages (BIPA) classes, academic writing workshops and one-to-one English consultations.

2.2 Targeted recruitment and special pathways

• Government-to-government scholarship for Afghan students (PEMRI-UIII). Under a 2022 agreement between UIII and Indonesian AID (LDKPI), Afghan students receive travel support from Indonesian AID while UIII funds tuition and living costs. Afghanistan remained one of the four largest sending countries in 2025 with 18 students, including women doctoral candidates supported through the Netherlands-UIII scheme.
• Outreach to Africa. On 26 February 2025 the university met the incoming Indonesian Ambassador to Senegal, whose accreditation covers The Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Sierra Leone, Côte d'Ivoire and Cabo Verde, and agreed to build recruitment networks through Indonesian embassies in Nigeria, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Kenya and Mozambique. The result is visible in Table 3: the six West African countries alone account for 79 students.
• Pathway for students from conflict-affected areas. In September 2025 UIII admitted a student from Gaza, Palestine, into the MA Turath Islam programme with full scholarship support; on 29 December 2025 the Ambassador of Palestine visited the campus to discuss further scholarship places and exchange.
• Embassy engagement. Ambassadors and representatives of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Nigeria, Sudan and the Philippines attended the 3rd UIII Commencement on 27 August 2025, reflecting the diplomatic channels through which candidates are identified and encouraged to apply.
• Pre-departure and arrival support. An online pre-departure session on 3 September 2025, attended by 160 of the 179 admitted students, covered visas and immigration, travel and accommodation, health and safety, and academic and non-academic life; on arrival, international students receive airport pickup, immigration reporting assistance and orientation from the International Office.

2.3 Career, internship and post-graduation opportunities

UIII's approach to post-graduation pathways recognises that most of its developing-country students intend to return home to universities, ministries, civil society organisations and financial institutions. The UIII Alumni Association operates an alumni portal with a global job board and a tracer study that tracks graduates' destinations and keeps them connected to the university's network. During their studies, international students are encouraged to take up internships and volunteering; in 2025 they served as volunteer instructors in the BIPA programme, as officers of the International Students Association (ISA) and faculty student associations, and as participants in professional certificate programmes hosted on campus, such as the 8th Certificate Course on International Humanitarian Law and Islamic Law delivered with the International Committee of the Red Cross on 6 to 10 October 2025, which drew participants from Nigeria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Philippines, The Gambia and Malawi. The university's dual-degree tracks with the University of Edinburgh and SOAS University of London add an international credential to the UIII degree; 14 of the 164 graduates of 2025 completed a dual degree. Alumni sharing sessions during faculty orientation connect new students with graduates who have already made the transition back to professional life in their home countries.

Figures 2 and 3 document the two ends of UIII's outreach chain: the diplomatic and institutional engagement that generates awareness of the university in target countries, and the information and preparation sessions that convert that awareness into successful enrolment. Because UIII does not recruit through commercial agents, its outreach relies on Indonesian embassies, partner universities such as Al-Azhar, and the testimony of current students and alumni in their home communities. The effectiveness of this model is measurable in the enrolment data: the 2025 intake added five new sending countries, and the 160-participant pre-departure session shows that the great majority of admitted candidates, most of them first-time travellers to Indonesia, were reached and prepared before departure. For prospective applicants in developing countries, this visible, embassy-backed presence builds confidence that a fully funded place at UIII is a realistic prospect rather than a remote possibility.

Section 3: Financial Aid and Holistic Student Support Framework

All 186 students counted in this report hold a scholarship that is funded by UIII or administered through the university on behalf of the Government of Indonesia or a partner donor. The principal instrument is the UIII Scholarship, a fully funded award that covers tuition, accommodation, a monthly living allowance, health insurance, airfare and study allowances for the full duration of the programme. Scholarship recipients living in the on-campus dormitory have the accommodation fee of IDR 1,000,000 per month deducted automatically from their monthly stipend of IDR 5,000,000, so that housing is secured without any out-of-pocket payment. Table 4 sets out the schemes, the services they provide and the number of students served in 2025.

Table 4. Financial Aid Schemes and Supporting Budget Commitment, 2025.

Table 4 demonstrates the depth of the university's financial commitment. Nearly three-quarters of the cohort (137 students, 73.7%) are funded entirely from UIII's own budget through the full UIII Scholarship, a further 23 receive university-funded category or partial awards, and the remaining 26 are supported through schemes in which the Government of Indonesia (PEMRI, LPDP) or partner governments (Norway, the Netherlands) provide the funding while UIII provides the academic place, accommodation and administration. The allocation is efficient in two senses. First, the aid is comprehensive rather than fragmented: by bundling tuition, housing, stipend, insurance and travel into a single award, UIII removes the hidden costs (visa, airfare, deposit, first-month rent) that most often prevent students from low income countries from taking up a nominally "full" scholarship elsewhere. Second, the aid is targeted: the full award is prioritised for first-time master's students who have no prior graduate qualification, while doctoral funding is leveraged through the LPDP partnership so that university resources can be concentrated where they create the largest access gains. The indicative value of around IDR 20.8 billion per year for this cohort alone represents a transfer of educational investment from Indonesia to 24 low and lower-middle income countries, which is the practical meaning of UN Target 10.B at the level of a single institution. Because employment under a student visa is not permitted in Indonesia, UIII does not operate a work-study scheme; the stipend is set at a level intended to make paid work unnecessary, and internships and volunteering are offered as professional development rather than as a source of income.

3.1 Non-financial support: advising, counselling, language and cultural adaptation

Financial aid is only effective if students complete their programmes, and the university has built a layered support framework around the scholarship to make that possible. Academic guidance operates on two levels: every student is assigned an academic advisor at enrolment who monitors course selection and progression, and a thesis or dissertation supervisor is appointed at the proposal stage, so that international students have both a general mentor and a specialist research guide. Orientation Week (15 to 19 September 2025) introduced the 2025 cohort, drawn from 28 countries, to the academic system, grading, programme structures and the Student Code of Conduct, while faculty-level orientations addressed academic ethics in the age of generative AI, cultural awareness, and the prevention of sexual harassment. The SHARE 2025 thesis writing camp at the Jusuf Kalla Library (2 to 3 June 2025) and the Language and Writing Class, which provides academic writing workshops and one-to-one English consultations, give structured help at the point where international students are most at risk of delay.

Psychosocial support is delivered through the Counselling and Mental Health Services (CMHS), introduced to new students on 19 September 2025. CMHS provides individual and group counselling, psychological screening, psychoeducation and referrals in a setting that explicitly respects diversity of culture, gender and background, with appointments booked through a dedicated application; its first psychoeducation series addressed the relocation stress that international students commonly experience. Cultural adaptation is supported by a peer model: the BIPA programme pairs international learners with volunteer language buddies (in its fourth batch, May to June 2025, ten volunteers delivered twelve sessions across ten classes), and the International Students Association organises the social calendar that helps newcomers settle. Daily living is anchored by the on-campus dormitory designed for international postgraduate students, student health insurance, campus shuttle and bicycle services, sports facilities, and an International Office contact line for immigration and documentation. Career guidance is provided through the alumni portal, alumni sharing sessions and the encouragement of internships described in Section 2.3. Taken together, these measures convert a scholarship into a completed degree: they address the academic, emotional, linguistic and practical dimensions of studying abroad for students who, in many cases, are the first in their families or institutions to do so.

Section 4: Academic Collaboration and Multicultural Integration

International students from developing countries at UIII study within a dense calendar of academic exchange with visiting scholars and partner universities, and within a campus culture that treats diversity as a resource to be cultivated rather than a difference to be managed. Table 5 lists the academic exchange and joint learning activities documented on UIII and faculty websites for 2025; Table 6 lists the multicultural initiatives on campus.

Table 5. Academic Exchange and Joint Learning Programmes Involving International Students, 2025.

The programme recorded in Table 5 shows that knowledge transfer at UIII runs in several directions at once. Visiting scholars from Europe, North America, Australia, the Middle East and Hong Kong bring methodological training and current debates directly to the campus, so that a student from Sierra Leone or Bangladesh receives the same exposure to leading researchers as a student at a well-resourced university in the Global North, without the cost of travel. Residencies such as Prof. Ayman Shihadeh's seven-week fellowship, and the summer schools in research methods (STQ2M), manuscripts (SCRIPTS) and digital humanities, convert that exposure into transferable skills. At the same time, flagship conferences hosted on campus, AICIS+ 2025 with 2,434 abstracts from 31 countries, the Religious Environmentalism conference and the Human Fraternity conference, give international students the opportunity to present their own research to a global audience and to build the collaborative networks that will connect their home institutions to the wider scholarly community after graduation. The partnership dimension is institutional as well as individual: the Al-Azhar delegation, the new agreements with Hartford International University and Mahidol University, and the established dual-degree tracks with Edinburgh and SOAS embed the developing-country cohort in a multi-continental academic network.

Table 6. Multicultural Initiatives and Activities on Campus, 2025.

Table 6 illustrates how cultural integration at UIII is organised around shared rhythms rather than one-off showcases. The Ramadan programme is the clearest example: for a month, Indonesian and international students break their fast together every evening at the campus mosque, pray behind imams from different countries, and trade at a bazaar run by student vendors from Nepal to The Gambia, so that integration happens through daily practice rather than through a single "international week". The International Iftar with its national costume competition, the Vice Minister's dialogue with international students, and the Eid celebration for those who remain on campus extend the same logic. Outside the religious calendar, mixed sports teams (the football championship won under a Gambian captain, the running and mountain clubs) and the end-of-year "United as One" festival give local and international students shared projects with shared ownership. Participation is genuinely two-sided: Indonesian students volunteer as BIPA instructors and language buddies, international students lead ISA and sit on faculty associations, and Convocation Week deliberately mixes the 98 international and 92 Indonesian newcomers of the 2025 cohort from the first day. The effectiveness of these events is reflected in the testimony recorded on the university's website, where international students describe UIII as a place that "provides the best services for us, and there is no discrimination".

4.1 Inclusive and multicultural curriculum

Inclusion is also built into the curriculum. All degree programmes are delivered in English to mixed cohorts, so that every course functions as a multicultural learning environment in which comparative cases from South Asia, West Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia are brought into the classroom by the students themselves. Beyond this, the university offers specifically inclusion-oriented provision: the BIPA course in Bahasa Indonesia for international students; the Language and Writing Class with academic writing workshops and English consultations; the Classical Islam (Turath) track, which admits Arabic-medium graduates and bridges traditional and modern scholarship; and interdisciplinary programmes in Climate Change Public Policy and Sustainable Finance whose syllabi are oriented to the development challenges of the Global South. Faculty orientation sessions on cultural awareness and on the prevention of sexual harassment set the behavioural standards that make this diverse classroom safe for all participants.

Figures 4 to 9 together portray the lived environment behind the statistics in Sections 1 and 3. The academic images (Figures 4 to 6) show international students from developing countries not as passive recipients of lectures but as active participants in a global scholarly conversation: questioning the Rector of Al-Azhar, working through manuscripts with instructors from Edinburgh and Sciences Po, and presenting their own research alongside scholars from thirty countries at AICIS+ 2025. The cultural images (Figures 7 to 9) show the same students in the social fabric of the campus, dressed in national costume at the International Iftar, running food stalls at the Ramadan bazaar, and being welcomed in Convocation Week alongside their Indonesian peers. The consistent message of these images is that UIII has succeeded in creating a learning community that is global in composition and inclusive in practice. For a graduate university that recruits more than half of its master's students from low and lower-middle income countries, this inclusive atmosphere is not an amenity; it is the condition under which scholarship students complete their degrees, build cross-border networks and return home equipped to contribute to the development of their own societies, which is the ultimate purpose of UN Targets 10.A and 10.B.