The Dutch search engine Grantfinder.nl is aimed at international students and research staff who are looking for sources of funding for their studies in the Netherlands.

Grantfinder is an initiative of Nuffic, the Netherlands Organization for International Cooperation in Higher Education. It is the first search engine specifically designed to bring together all sources of funding available to international undergraduate and postgraduate students looking to study in the Netherlands.

International students do not generally qualify for normal undergraduate student grants from the Dutch government, yet there are many other sources of funding available to them. These range from private scholarship programs to scholarships and funds provided by universities and other higher education institutions. Some sources of funding are made available through government departments, such as the Netherlands Fellowships Program that awards grants to students from developing countries.

The Grantfinder is quite simple to use. After logging on to www.grantfinder.nl, just enter a few search criteria, such as your home country and your intended field of study, and then select the scholarships that you're interested in. Each scholarship available is presented together with details of the qualification criteria and other relevant information, such as how much it's worth, how long it's available for, whether there are any age restrictions, and how to apply. The Grantfinder only shows the information that's relevant to the user, so a sociologist, for example, doesn't have to wade through a list of scholarships only available to mathematics graduates.

There are currently around 30,000 international students at higher education institutions in the Netherlands. Government policy is designed to attract academic talent, top students and innovative researchers to the Netherlands. An international environment with talented minds from other parts of the world is an essential ingredient if our higher education in the Netherlands is to compete with the rest of the world. And we can only expand our knowledge-based economy if we can compete.

Nuffic already has extensive experience with this type of search engine in the form of Beursopener, a website designed to help Dutch students find scholarships and grants that will allow them to study abroad. See www.beursopener.nl for more information.