We list 65 fully Funded Masters 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 (9), the United Kingdom (7) and Australia (5). Awards with a known closing date are listed soonest first.
Written from the 65 awards on this page — every figure below is counted from what the awards themselves state. 6 min read.
This page collects 65 fully funded masters scholarships open to Nigerian students. Every award here is labelled fully funded by the body offering it, every one is at masters level, and every one can be applied for by a Nigerian passport holder. That last point is worth stating plainly, because it is the thing most students spend hours trying to confirm: of the 65 awards, 5 name Nigeria or the West African region in their own eligibility text, and the remaining 60 carry no nationality restriction at all. Those two figures are the whole 65 — not two separate pools on top of each other. No award on this page states an eligibility rule that excludes Nigerians.
The list is built for one reader: someone with a first degree or HND who wants a taught or research masters abroad and cannot fund it personally. If that is you, the next few sections tell you what the awards actually pay for, what they ask you to submit, and how the deadlines fall.
"Fully funded" is not one thing. It is a bundle, and the bundle differs by award. Here is how many of the 65 name each benefit in their own text:
Read that as what the awards say in writing, not as a promise that every line will be covered. Tuition is the benefit most commonly stated, and living costs appear in roughly half the entries. Where an award does not name a benefit, treat it as unknown and check the individual page before you build a budget around it. The gap between tuition-only and tuition-plus-stipend is the difference between arriving with savings and arriving with a shortfall, so it is worth reading each award's own wording rather than the headline.
China hosts the largest single group on this list with 9 awards, followed by the United Kingdom with 7. Australia, Switzerland and the United States each account for 5. Canada, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates each have 3. France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands and New Zealand have 2 apiece, and Belgium, Denmark, Hungary, Ireland, Singapore and Spain each contribute 1.
By subject, the spread is broad. Business and Management leads with 10, then Engineering with 8. Arts and Humanities, Law, and Medicine and Health Sciences each have 7. Economics and Finance has 6, Education 5, Social Sciences 4, and Agriculture 3. Public Policy and Development has 2, with Computer Science and IT and Natural Sciences at 1 each.
Some awards are tied to a named institution rather than a government. The University of Oxford appears as provider on 3 entries. Participating Australian Institutions, the Australian National University, the University of Tasmania, the University of Southern Denmark and a group listed as Japanese Universities each appear once.
The entry qualification is a first degree or HND — B.Sc, B.A, B.Eng, LLB, MBBS or HND. These are masters awards, both taught and research, and most state a minimum class of degree. Where an award asks for an "upper second", that corresponds to Second Class Upper (2:1) on a Nigerian transcript. Whether a particular university accepts an HND for a given masters programme is decided by that university, not by this page, so confirm it with the admissions office before you spend money on a transcript.
Of the 65 awards, 16 state a minimum degree class in their own requirements. The rest either set a different bar or leave the wording general. If your class falls below what an award states, the application is unlikely to move, and it is better to know that before paying courier fees.
The paperwork is where most Nigerian applicants lose time, so here is what the awards themselves state:
Two things follow from this. First, references are the single most common requirement, so line up your referees early — a former supervisor or head of department who can write specifically about your work, not a general character letter. Second, an English test is required by 28 of the awards, which means a good number do not state it. Where a test is not named, a waiver may be possible, often on the strength of a degree taught in English, but that decision belongs to the university. Ask in writing rather than assuming.
The 4 awards that require an admission offer first work in the opposite order: you apply to the university, secure a place, then apply for the funding. Those need a longer runway than the rest.
22 of the 65 awards carry a stated date, and all 22 of those are still open at the time of writing. The remaining 43 are undated — they run on a recurring cycle, and 22 of them are marked recurring. For those, the pattern matters more than a single date: October and November are the busiest months with 4 deadlines each, and April follows with 3.
These close soonest:
If you are reading this in the week before one of those dates, the honest advice is to look at the undated awards instead and prepare properly for the next cycle.
Where awards state a duration, the most common is 1 year (4 awards), followed by 2 years (3 awards). One entry sets out a longer structure: undergraduate 4–5 years, masters 2–3 years, PhD 3–4 years. Another states a PhD term of 3.5 years with no extension available, which is a reminder to check the funding period against your programme length before you accept a place. A masters that runs longer than the funded window leaves you covering the remainder yourself.
Work in this order. Decide your subject and two or three countries, using the counts above to see where the volume sits. Shortlist four or five awards from this list and open each one. For every award, write down three things: what it states it covers, what it states it requires, and whether it carries a date. That single page of notes will tell you more than any general advice.
Then start the slow items. Request transcripts from your institution — that queue is often the longest. Brief your referees with your CV and a draft of your statement so their letters say something specific. If an English test is required, book it now, because test dates and score reporting take time you will not have in the final week. If an award requires an admission offer first, begin the university application immediately, since the funding application cannot start without it.
Finally, treat the undated 43 as your pipeline rather than your leftovers. They recur, which means a missed cycle is a preparation window, not a closed door. Read each award's own page carefully, apply to the ones that fit, and keep your documents ready so that when a deadline approaches you are assembling a file rather than starting one.
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