“I thought I might go to school someday, but never a university like Pan-Atlantic University. That kind of dream didn’t belong to someone like me.”
At 26, Elizabeth speaks with a quiet conviction that only comes from having lived through what most people never will. After losing her father, she fled in search of safety, crossing into Cameroon, only to be forced back by conflict. With no clear path forward, she arrived at a refugee camp in Cross River State, Nigeria. There, life narrowed into something immediate and fragile: survival. Not ambition. Not education.
“I didn’t plan on going to school,” she says. “There was no money, no support.” She hadn’t even registered for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME). When representatives from Pan-Atlantic University visited the camp to share scholarship opportunities, Elizabeth wasn’t thinking about herself. She was helping others, handing out flyers, encouraging people to apply, quietly standing on the sidelines of a future she didn’t believe she could claim.
But sometimes, it takes just one person to see what you cannot yet see in yourself.
For Elizabeth, that person was her supervisor at Karitas Nigeria, Mrs Eno. She saw something steady, something promising, and acted on it. She sponsored Elizabeth’s UTME registration and pushed her to try. That single act of belief changed everything.
Out of all the applicants from Cross River State, Elizabeth was the only one selected for the Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program.
“When I got selected as a Mastercard Foundation Scholar,” she says, smiling at the memory, “I screamed.”
Today, Elizabeth studies Film and Multimedia Studies at Pan-Atlantic University. But more than that, she has found her voice. She describes PAU as a place of “freedom of expression”—a space where she is learning to speak, to dream, to become. The girl who once stood at the edges, unsure if she belonged, is now stepping fully into her story.
And that story is still unfolding.
Elizabeth dreams of becoming an actress—of telling stories that move people, that matter. It’s a dream that might have once felt distant, even impossible. But now, it feels within reach.
She is no longer defined by displacement or limitation. She is a Mastercard Foundation Scholar. A storyteller in the making. A young woman with courage, shaped by adversity but not confined by it.
And when she speaks to others, her message carries the weight of lived truth:
“Give your best… you never can tell. You could be a Mastercard Foundation Scholar tomorrow.”