We list 10 fully Funded Arts & Humanities Scholarships Open to Nigerian Students, with the deadline, study level and eligibility of each one taken from the award's own terms. Most are held in China (4), the United States (2) and Australia (1). Awards with a known closing date are listed soonest first.
These awards do not restrict the field of study, so arts & humanities applicants can apply too.
Written from the 10 awards on this page — every figure below is counted from what the awards themselves state. 5 min read.
This page collects 10 fully funded scholarships in the arts and humanities that are open to Nigerian students. Every award here is labelled fully funded by the body offering it, and none of the 10 carries a nationality restriction that would shut out a Nigerian applicant. That is the whole point of the filter: you should not have to read through a page of awards and then discover, three paragraphs down, that only citizens of certain countries may apply.
The list runs across six countries. China appears most often, with 4 awards. The United States has 2, and Australia, Canada, Germany and the Netherlands each have 1. The spread matters if you already have a preference about where you want to spend two or three years, or if you are following a supervisor rather than a country.
The awards are not all pitched at the same stage, and some are open at more than one level. Seven of the 10 are open to Masters applicants and seven to PhD applicants. Four are open at Bachelors level, which is worth noting if you are finishing secondary school or already partway through a first degree and looking at a fully funded route abroad. One is a fellowship.
Because the levels overlap, a single award can serve a Masters applicant and a doctoral applicant at once. Read each entry on its own terms rather than assuming the page is aimed at one group.
Fully funded does not mean the same thing from one award to the next, so it helps to know what these 10 say in their own text. Four name tuition. Four name living costs. Three name travel. Three name research or training costs. Two name health insurance, and one names accommodation.
Those are the benefits the awards state in writing. Where an award does not name a particular cost, treat it as something to confirm with the provider before you build a budget around it. Transcript fees, courier charges, document legalisation and test registration are usually paid by you at the application stage, long before any award money moves.
All 10 of the awards on this page are open to Nigerian students. None of the 10 names Nigeria or the wider region as a restricted eligible country, and none of the 10 states a nationality restriction. The remaining route onto the list is simply that the award sets no nationality bar at all, which is the case for all 10.
That is a cleaner position than it sounds. Many international awards are quietly channelled through partner universities or regional quotas, and a Nigerian applicant can spend weeks on a form before finding that out. Here, eligibility turns on your qualifications, your proposed subject and your documents, not your passport.
The paperwork is where these applications are won or lost, and the brief is specific about what the awards ask for. Six of the 10 require letters of recommendation. Four require a research proposal. Three require an English test score, IELTS or TOEFL. Two state a minimum degree class. One requires an admission offer before you apply for the funding.
Plan around the recommendation letters first. Nigerian referees are often senior academics or employers who travel, sit on committees and answer email in batches, so give them at least a month and send a reminder a week before the deadline. Ask for the letter in writing, tell them exactly which award it is for, and attach your draft proposal or personal statement so they can speak to your project rather than your character alone.
The two awards that state a minimum degree class are worth checking early. If you hold a Second Class Lower or an HND, read the entry carefully before you spend money on transcripts. Where a class is stated, it is stated, and there is no appeal against it.
The English test requirement covers three of the 10. If you studied your previous degree in English, some providers waive the test, but only where their own rules allow it. Do not assume a waiver; ask the admissions office in writing and keep the reply.
Five of the 10 have a stated date and five are recurring, meaning the cycle returns each year. Five are currently open. The busiest months are October and December, with two deadlines each, and March with one.
The awards closing soonest are:
Two of those five fall in the same month, which is the practical warning on this page. December is crowded. If you intend to apply to both the Yenching Academy award and the Groningen award, start the recommendation letters in September, not November.
Every award here is tagged to arts and humanities, which is the filter that produced the list. Several also sit in other subject areas, so an applicant working at the edge of two disciplines may find more than one entry relevant. Seven of the 10 are also tagged to business and management, seven to engineering, and seven to medicine and health sciences. Six touch law, five economics and finance, five education.
That overlap is normal for university-wide awards, which fund a scholar in any department rather than a named subject. If your project sits between, say, history and law, or literature and education, check the entry rather than assuming the arts and humanities tag excludes you.
Work backwards from the deadlines. If you are aiming at the October or December awards, the sequence is: choose two or three entries from the list, confirm the eligibility wording on each, request your transcripts and your recommendation letters, then draft the research proposal where one is required.
Two of the awards on this page are tied to named providers you can look up directly: Stanford University and Peking University. Others are run through city-wide or national schemes, including the Shanghai and Beijing university lists, and one Canadian award is hosted through an institution with a quota to supervise Vanier scholars. Where an award is hosted rather than owned, your first contact is the department, not the funder.
Read each entry in full before you commit money to a courier. The details that decide an application, the degree class, the test score, the proposal length, sit in the award's own text, and that is what this page points you to.
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