We list 10 fully Funded Medicine & Health Sciences 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 (3), Australia (2) and the United States (2). Awards with a known closing date are listed soonest first.
These awards do not restrict the field of study, so medicine & health sciences 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 medicine and health sciences that are open to Nigerian students. Every award here is labelled fully funded by the provider, so there is no partially funded entry to filter out. The list spans six countries: China (3), Australia (2), the United States (2), the Netherlands (1), Singapore (1) and Thailand (1).
If you are working through a shortlist of funding options and want to see how medicine compares with other fields, the same database carries engineering, business and management and law collections. The medicine and health sciences set is the one on this page.
All 10 awards are open to Nigerian applicants. For 9 of them, the award text carries no nationality restriction at all, which means your Nigerian passport is not a barrier in itself. For 1 award, Nigeria or the wider region is named directly in the eligibility criteria.
That distinction matters when you are reading the fine print. An award with no stated nationality restriction still has academic conditions attached, and those are where most applications are lost. Read the eligibility section of each individual award page before you spend money on a transcript courier.
The list is weighted towards postgraduate research. Levels overlap because a single award can fund more than one stage of study.
If you are finishing a B.Sc or HND and looking for a taught Masters, the Masters group is your starting point. If you already hold a Masters and are chasing a doctorate, the PhD group is larger and, in medicine and health sciences, usually the better funded of the two.
These are the benefits named in the award text. They are what the provider has written down, not a promise that every line item applies to every successful applicant.
Tuition and living costs are the two lines that appear most often, and they are the two that decide whether a Nigerian applicant can actually take up an offer. Travel appearing in 4 awards is worth noting: a flight to Australia, the United States or China is a real cost, and an award that names travel is doing more for you than one that does not. Where an award names research or training costs, that usually covers bench fees, consumables or conference attendance for a laboratory-based programme.
Requirements stated in the award text break down as follows.
Recommendation letters are the most common single requirement, so line up your referees early. Approach two or three lecturers or consultants who know your work, give them your CV and your draft personal statement, and give them weeks rather than days. An English test score is named in 4 awards; if you are applying to several of them, one IELTS or TOEFL sitting covers the group, so budget for it once and diarise the test date against the earliest deadline you are targeting.
Only 1 award states a minimum degree class in its text. That does not mean the others ignore your transcript. It means the class requirement is not written into the award description, so check the provider's own admission page for the programme you want. The award that asks for a research proposal is a research-degree award; start drafting that proposal before you open the application form. The award that requires an admission offer first runs on a different sequence from the rest, so you apply to the university before you apply for the money.
The spread of countries is uneven, and that shapes your planning more than anything else on this page.
China carries the largest single group, and the providers listed there include Shanghai Universities and Beijing Universities, so the awards are distributed across institutions rather than concentrated in one. Australia's two awards come through Participating Australian Institutions and the University of Tasmania. The United States entries include Stanford University. Singapore's award is run by A*STAR in collaboration with NTU, NUS and SUTD, which is a research-agency route rather than a single university route.
Five of the awards on this page carry a stated date and 5 are recurring, meaning the provider runs the round on a cycle rather than a one-off closing date. Five are still open at the time of writing and 5 are undated in the listing.
The busiest months across the dated awards are October (2), April (1) and June (1). The awards closing soonest are:
The Shanghai Government Scholarship (SGS) runs on a different pattern: applications fall between January and June of each year, so there is no single closing date to circle. If you are applying to that one, work backwards from the June end of the window rather than waiting for an announcement.
Start with the award whose deadline is nearest and work outwards. The Stanford award closes on 8 October, which is the tightest window on this page. The Groningen award closes 1 December, which gives you a second target if the first round does not go your way.
Then decide your level. If you are applying at PhD level, you have 8 awards to choose from and the research proposal and supervisor contact will take the longest, so begin there. If you are applying at Masters level, you have 7, and the recommendation letters and English test will be your critical path. If you are applying at Bachelors level, you have 5.
Finally, treat the funding lines as what they are: statements written into the award description. Confirm the current value, duration and conditions on the provider's own page before you commit to a programme, and check the University of Tasmania entry in particular, since its listing quotes a per annum rate that is indexed each January.
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