We list 10 phD Arts & Humanities Scholarships for Nigerian Students, with the deadline, study level and eligibility of each one taken from the award's own terms. 9 of them are fully funded. Most are held in Australia (3), China (3) and Canada (1). 8 state eligibility that includes Nigerian applicants. 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 PhD scholarships in Arts & Humanities that are open to Nigerian students. Every entry sits at doctoral level. Nine of the ten are labelled fully funded, and one does not state its funding either way, so treat that one as an unknown until you read the award page itself.
The list is not only for PhD applicants. Seven of the ten awards also take Master's applicants, four also take Bachelors applicants, and one is listed as a fellowship. If you are still finishing an M.Sc, an M.A, an MBA or an M.Phil, some of these pages are worth opening now rather than later.
The ten awards are spread across six countries. Australia carries three, China carries three, and Canada, Germany, Romania and the United States carry one each.
Providers include Monash University with two awards, the University of Tasmania, Stanford University, Shanghai Universities, Beijing Universities, and a Canadian institution holding a quota to host Vanier scholars. The Germany entry, the Leo Baeck Fellowship, is run by the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes.
If your research needs a specific archive, a language environment or a supervisor working on your exact topic, the country list matters more than the ranking. Three awards in Australia and three in China means your realistic shortlist is likely to be built around where the supervision exists, not around which flag looks best on a form.
Eight of the ten awards are open to Nigerian applicants. None of those eight names Nigeria or the African region in its eligibility text, which means the opening comes from the award placing no nationality restriction at all. That is a different kind of openness from an award that names Nigeria directly, and it usually means you are competing in a general international pool.
For the remaining two awards, the eligibility is not stated on the award page. Do not assume either way. Open the individual page, read the eligibility section, and if nationality is still unclear, email the provider before you spend money on transcripts or a courier.
The route into this level is straightforward on paper: you hold a Master's degree, and you are applying for a PhD or doctoral place. In practice, most funded doctoral positions are tied to a supervisor or a research group, so the programme application and the scholarship application often share one deadline. Miss the programme deadline and the funding deadline becomes irrelevant.
Read these as what the awards say in writing, not as a promise that every line will be covered in your case.
The pattern is worth noticing. Living costs and research costs appear more often than tuition, which tells you that several of these awards assume tuition is already handled elsewhere, or that the award is built around a funded doctoral place rather than a standalone fee waiver. Before you apply, work out which part of your costs is actually covered and which part you would still be paying from Nigeria.
One award does not state its funding at all. Nothing on this page tells you what it covers, so do not plan around it.
The requirements the awards state in their own text fall like this:
The research proposal is the single most common demand, and it is also the item Nigerian applicants most often under-prepare. A doctoral proposal is not a statement of purpose. It needs a question, a method, a sense of the existing literature, and a reason the department you are applying to is the right place to do it. Give yourself weeks, not days.
Four awards ask for recommendation letters. Approach your referees early and give them your proposal draft, your CV and the deadline in writing. A referee writing from memory produces a generic letter.
Three awards ask for IELTS or TOEFL. If you studied your degree in English, check the individual award page before you pay for a test. Some providers waive the requirement and some do not, and the brief does not tell us which of these three do.
Two awards state a minimum degree class. Nigerian applicants should have their class of degree wording ready exactly as it appears on the transcript, since providers sometimes ask for a classification that does not map cleanly onto our system.
One award requires an admission offer before you can apply for the funding. For that one, the university application comes first and the scholarship application second.
Six of the ten awards carry a date, and all six are still open. Four are undated, and six are recurring, meaning they run again on a cycle rather than closing permanently.
The busiest months are October with three deadlines, March with two, and May with one. October is the month to plan around.
The awards closing soonest are:
One further dated award, the University of Tasmania Scholarship 2027 (Fully Funded), closes 1 October. It is listed for Master's and PhD applicants.
Two of these carry a stated duration. One award runs for 3 years. Another states a PhD duration of 3.5 years with no extension available, which is worth reading carefully before you build a fieldwork plan that assumes a fourth year.
Start with the October deadlines, because they are the ones you can still act on. Open the Stanford page and the Monash Sir James McNeill page first, read the eligibility section line by line, and confirm whether a research proposal and referee letters are needed.
Then work backwards. If a proposal is required, block out the time to write it properly. If an English test is required, book the test now, because results take time to reach the provider. If recommendation letters are required, ask your referees this week and give them the deadline in writing.
For the two awards where eligibility is not stated, send an email to the provider before you spend money on transcripts, courier fees or test registration. A short, specific question about Nigerian eligibility costs nothing and can save you a full application cycle.
Finally, treat the undated awards as background reading rather than active targets. Six of the ten are recurring, so a deadline you have missed this cycle is often a deadline you can meet in the next one. Build the proposal once, and it serves you across several of these applications.
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