Foreign Scholarships for Sri Lankan Students
Ten funded scholarships are channelled to Sri Lankan citizens — MEXT, ICCR, the Chinese Government schemes, Stipendium Hungaricum and Chevening. Enter your date of birth, A/L results, degree and work history once, and see which you qualify for, which rule blocks the rest, and where to apply.
How it works
There is no scoring here and nothing is weighted. Each programme is a list of published conditions joined by AND, each condition is checked against what you entered, and the card shows you the rule, what it asks for, and what you gave it. A rule that the notice states as a recommendation rather than a requirement is marked advisory and can never turn a verdict into “not eligible”.
Step 1 — age is measured on the deadline, not today.Every notice fixes its own date. The Indian ICCR notice says “between 18–40 years as at 16.03.2026”; the Chinese notices say “below 35 years on 06.12.2025”; the Hungarian undergraduate notice says “over 18 years old as of 31st August 2026”. The tool computes whole completed years on each of those dates separately, which is why the age table shows a different number per row. Age is calculated twice by two different routines — calendar components, and a count of birthdays elapsed — and the page only claims its logic is cross-checked when the two agree, including across leap days.
Step 2 — MEXT states a birth date, so a birth date is what is stored.The 2027 undergraduate notice reads “applicant should be born on or after April 2, 2002”, and the research notice “born on or after April 2, 1992”. Those are transcribed literally and compared directly, never rewritten as “under 25” or “under 35”. Around the April boundary the two readings differ by months, and 2 April is exactly where a rewritten rule would start lying.
Step 3 — the A/L gates name a sitting and sometimes the subjects.Three passes is the floor everywhere, and A, B, C and S are all passes under the Department of Examinations grading. But each notice names one sitting: the ICCR, Chinese and Hungarian 2026/27 notices all name the 2024 A/L, and MEXT's 2027 notice names 2025. MEXT goes further and names the subjects — Chemistry, Physics, Combined Mathematics — and the ICCR notice makes Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics compulsory for its engineering courses. If the only thing stopping you is that you sat a later A/L than the notice names, the tool says so as its own verdict rather than calling you ineligible, because the Ministry names the current cohort in every cycle and the next notice is the one you want.
Step 4 — the English rules are two grades, not a test.The ICCR, Chinese undergraduate and Stipendium Hungaricum undergraduate notices all print the same pair: at least a C pass in English at O/L and an S pass at A/L. MEXT's research notice asks for A/L English at C or better. MEXT's undergraduate notice asks only for “a good knowledge of English” with no grade, so that row is advisory — inventing a grade there would wrongly reject people. IELTS and TOEFL appear only as the host university's own requirement, which is why this tool does not ask for a score.
Step 5 — Chevening is arithmetic in hours. Chevening asks for 2,800hours of work experience acquired after your undergraduate degree, “based on a 35-hour work week”. Those two published figures fix the third: 2,800 hours over two years at 35 hours a week is 40 working weeks a year, so a year is 1,400 hours and a month is 116.67. Chevening also requires the hours to have been “acquired over a minimum of two years”, so both the hour count and the 24-month span are enforced, and the undergraduate degree must have finished at least two years before the deadline. That last one is measured from the end of the month you were awarded, which is the reading that cannot accidentally tell you that you qualify a month early.
Step 6 — a closed cycle is reported as a closed cycle.Nine of these ten deadlines have passed. This page never rolls a deadline forward: each card shows the date actually printed in the last published notice, labels the cycle closed, and still evaluates you against that notice's rules so you know where you stand when the next one appears. The month each cycle has historically opened is shown as a pattern, never as a promise.
Worked examples
The ten programmes and where each one is published
Every rule in this tool comes from one of these documents. Nine are Ministry notices, each reissued once a year with a new cycle label and a new deadline; Chevening publishes its own.
| Programme | Cycle | Awards | Deadline in that notice | Usually opens |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MEXT Undergraduate | 2027 intake | — | 2026-05-18 | late April |
| MEXT Research | 2027 intake | — | 2026-05-18 | late April |
| ICCR Nehru Memorial | 2026/27 | 50 | 2026-03-16 | early March |
| ICCR Rajiv Gandhi | 2026/27 | 10 | 2026-03-16 | early March |
| Chinese Govt UG | 2026/27 | 2 | 2025-12-06 | mid-November |
| Chinese Govt Master’s | 2026/27 | — | 2025-12-06 | mid-November |
| Chinese Govt PhD | 2026/27 | — | 2025-12-06 | mid-November |
| Hungaricum UG | 2026/27 | 8 | 2026-01-15 · 14:00 Central European Time | late autumn, closing 15 January |
| Hungaricum PhD | 2026/27 | 4 | 2026-01-15 · 14:00 Central European Time | late autumn, closing 15 January |
| Chevening | 2027/28 | — | 2026-10-06 · 11:00 UTC | August, closing early October |
Deadlines are the ones printed in the notices linked above, read on 2026-09-28. None of them is projected forward.
Frequently asked questions
Sources & references
- MoHE — Foreign Scholarships online application portal
- MoHE — Guidelines on Foreign Scholarships Offered to Sri Lankan Students
- MoHE — Japanese Government (MEXT) Scholarships 2027, Undergraduate
- MoHE — Japanese Government (MEXT) Scholarships 2027, Research / Master's
- MoHE — Indian (ICCR) Undergraduate Scholarships, Nehru Memorial and Rajiv Gandhi Schemes 2026/27
- MoHE — Undergraduate Scholarships under the Chinese Government Scholarship Programme 2026/27
- MoHE — Postgraduate Scholarships under the Chinese Government Scholarship Programme 2026/27
- MoHE — Stipendium Hungaricum Undergraduate Scholarships, Hungary 2026/27
- MoHE — Stipendium Hungaricum Postgraduate (PhD) Scholarships, Hungary 2026/27
- Chevening — eligibility criteria
- Chevening — work experience requirement (2,800 hours)
- Chevening — Sri Lanka country page and 2027/28 deadline
- University Grants Commission of Sri Lanka
- UGC — Sri Lanka Qualifications Framework (SLQF 5 and SLQF 6)
Every rule, award count, age gate and deadline on this page was transcribed from the documents above on 2026-09-28. The notices are reissued annually, so the page is reviewed by 2027-01-20and after any new notice appears on the Ministry portal. One discrepancy is worth flagging: the Stipendium Hungaricum undergraduate notice says applicants must meet the criteria “on or before 15th January 2025” in one clause and gives a deadline of 15 January 2026 in another. This page uses the 2026 date.
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Comments & feedback
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Spotted a notice that has been reissued, or a rule read wrongly?
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