Scholarship finder app for African students
# Scholarship Finder for African Students
A web application that helps African students discover scholarship opportunities. The app combines a curated set of Africa-focused scholarship listings with **live scholarship data pulled from the Open Scholarships API**, giving users a searchable, filterable, and sortable database of funding opportunities in one place.
**Live app:**
18.212.1.23 (SSL certificate is issued for `codexal.tech`, so browsers will show a security warning when visiting via IP — click "Advanced" → "Proceed" to continue. `codexal.tech` will also resolve to the same load balancer once DNS propagation completes.)
**Demo video:** *[add your video link here once recorded]*
**GitHub repo:**
github.com
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## What the app does
- Lets users search and filter scholarships by country of origin, degree level, field of study, and funding type
- Sorts results by deadline, date posted, or award amount
- Lets users save/bookmark scholarships to a personal list (stored in the browser via `localStorage`)
- Displays detailed scholarship information in a modal (eligibility, requirements, benefits, application link)
- Pulls a **second, live section of real US-based scholarships** directly from the Open Scholarships API, fetched securely through a backend proxy
- Gracefully handles API failures — if the live data fails to load, the core African scholarship listings remain fully usable
## Tech stack
- **Frontend:** HTML, CSS, vanilla JavaScript, Font Awesome (CDN)
- **Backend:** Node.js + Express (serves the frontend and proxies API requests)
- **External API:** Open Scholarships via RapidAPI
- **Deployment:** Two AWS EC2 web servers running Nginx as a reverse proxy in front of the Node app, load balanced by HAProxy
## API used and credit
This project uses the **Open Scholarships API**, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
> Open Scholarships by Grudged LLC —
github.com (CC BY 4.0)
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