We list 61 undergraduate Scholarships Open to Nigerian Students, with the deadline, study level and eligibility of each one taken from the award's own terms. 33 of them are fully funded. Most are held in the United States (11), the United Kingdom (9) and Australia (8). Awards with a known closing date are listed soonest first.
Written from the 61 awards on this page — every figure below is counted from what the awards themselves state. 5 min read.
This page collects 61 undergraduate scholarships that are open to Nigerian students. Every entry is a first-degree award — a bachelors programme — rather than a masters, PhD or short course. The list is filtered two ways: the level is Bachelors, and the eligibility is open to Nigerian students. Nothing else has been mixed in.
For context, the same database holds 46 masters awards, 24 PhD awards, 4 fellowships, 3 postdoctoral awards, 3 short courses and 1 high school award. If you are still at secondary school level or already holding a first degree, those other lists will serve you better. This one is for the student who has finished secondary school and is looking for a first degree abroad.
The United States leads with 11 awards, followed by the United Kingdom with 9. Australia and Canada each carry 8. China has 6, New Zealand 3, and Germany and Italy 2 each. Saudi Arabia and Singapore also have 2 each. Then there is a long tail of single awards: Austria, France, Hungary, Japan, Qatar, Spain, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates each appear once.
That spread matters when you are paying for transcripts and courier fees out of your own pocket. A country with several awards on the list gives you more than one reason to send the same set of documents. If you are applying to the United States, for example, your WAEC scratch card, your school testimonial and your courier envelope can serve several applications rather than one.
Of the 61 awards, 33 are labelled fully funded and 12 are labelled partially funded. A further 16 do not state their funding position either way, so read each of those pages carefully before you build your plans around them.
Where awards spell out what they cover, the counts are these:
These are the benefits the awards name in their own text. They are not a promise that every listed award pays all of these, and they are not a promise that an award which names tuition will also cover your flight or your rent. Treat each figure as a starting point for reading the individual page.
All 61 awards on this page are open to Nigerian students. Of those, 4 name Nigeria or the Nigerian region directly in their eligibility text, and 57 carry no nationality restriction at all. Those two figures describe the same 61 awards from different angles — they are not separate pools you can add together.
None of the 61 leaves eligibility unstated. That is useful: it means you will not waste a courier fee on an award whose nationality rules nobody has written down.
The pathway into this level is straightforward. You finished secondary school, and your qualifications are WAEC, NECO, NABTEB or SSCE. Most of these awards ask for your senior secondary results and an admission offer, though each award page quotes its own entry requirement and you should read it in full before applying.
The requirements that appear most often across the list are these:
Two of these deserve a Nigerian reader's attention. First, the English test: 13 awards state it as a requirement, but that also means many on this list do not. Some institutions waive the test where your secondary schooling was taught and examined in English, and your WAEC or NECO English result is often the document they look at. Check the individual award page rather than assuming you must book IELTS.
Second, the minimum degree class. At undergraduate entry level this usually refers to your secondary school grades rather than a university classification, but the wording varies by award. Read what the page actually says before you decide you are or are not eligible.
Letters of recommendation are the single most common ask, at 15 awards. Approach your teachers and principal early. A referee who is given two weeks will write a better letter than one given two days, and many Nigerian schools need time to produce a letter on letterhead and stamp it.
Of the 61 awards, 13 carry a stated date and all 13 of those are still open. A further 13 run on a recurring cycle. The remaining 48 are undated, meaning the page does not give a closing date — for those, the award's own page is the place to confirm timing.
Among the dated awards, May is the busiest month with 4 deadlines, January has 3 and April has 2.
The awards closing soonest are:
Three of those five close on the same day in January. If you intend to apply to more than one, plan the document gathering as a single exercise rather than three separate ones.
Business and Management is the largest field with 11 awards. Arts and Humanities and Medicine and Health Sciences follow with 8 each. Engineering has 5, Education and Social Sciences 4 each, and Agriculture, Economics and Finance, Law and Natural Sciences 3 each. Computer Science and IT, and Energy and Environment, have 1 each.
If your intended course sits in one of the smaller fields, the list is thin but not empty. Read those pages closely and check the provider's own requirements, since a single award in your field is worth more attention than a crowded one you do not qualify for.
Start with the awards whose deadlines are nearest, since those are the ones you can still act on with a date in hand. The ACI Foundation Scholarship closes 1 November, and the Boston University Presidential Scholarship closes 1 December. Both are in the United States, so a single round of document preparation can serve both.
Then work through the January cluster: NTU, UBC and the Hungary Government Scholarship. You may also want to look at La Roche University Scholarships 2026-2027, which closes 15 April.
Before you send anything, confirm three things on the award page itself: whether the funding is full or partial, whether an English test is required or waived, and what the entry requirement says about your secondary school results. Then gather your WAEC or NECO results, your testimonial, your referee letters and your admission offer in one batch. The list is long enough that a well-prepared set of documents can carry several applications at once.
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