We list 8 phD 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. 8 of them are fully funded. Most are held in China (3), Australia (2) and Singapore (1). 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 8 awards on this page — every figure below is counted from what the awards themselves state. 6 min read.
This page collects 8 PhD scholarships in Medicine & Health Sciences that are open to Nigerian students. Every one of them is labelled fully funded by the provider. They are doctoral awards, and they sit in the medicine and health sciences field rather than in general science or engineering.
The list is narrow on purpose. It is not a directory of every funded PhD in the world. It is the set of awards we have confirmed as open to Nigerian applicants, with the funding, the requirements and the deadlines written out so you can decide quickly whether any of them fits your research area and your timeline.
The eight awards are spread across five countries.
China carries the largest share, which matters if you are weighing cost of living and the availability of laboratory-based research training. Australia and Singapore each host awards with a strong research component. The United States entry is a single university award, and Thailand appears once.
All 8 awards on this page are open to Nigerian students. For 1 of them, Nigeria or the wider region is named directly in the eligibility text. For the other 7, there is no nationality restriction at all — the award is open on merit and the country of origin does not disqualify you.
That distinction is worth understanding before you spend money on a courier. An award that names Nigeria or the region is telling you plainly that applicants from here are expected. An award with no nationality restriction is telling you that nobody will screen you out for holding a Nigerian passport, but it also means you are competing against everyone else who meets the academic bar.
None of the eight awards leaves its eligibility unstated. Where an award states a requirement, it is on the page.
These are doctoral awards, so the pathway in is a master's degree. In Nigerian terms that is an M.Sc, an M.A, an MBA or an M.Phil. A B.Sc or HND alone will not meet the entry point for this level.
Funded doctoral places and research scholarships of this kind are frequently tied to a supervisor or a research group. That has a practical consequence: the programme application and the scholarship application often share one deadline. You are not applying for money and then looking for a place afterwards. You are applying for a place in a group, and the funding comes with it.
If your master's is already completed and your transcripts are in hand, you are in the strongest position. If you are still finishing, check each award's own page for how it treats a degree that is not yet conferred.
All eight are labelled fully funded. Beyond that label, here is what the awards say in their own text about what they cover.
Read those as what the awards state in writing, not as a promise that every cost you will face is handled. A "fully funded" label and a line-by-line list of covered items are two different things, and the line-by-line list is the one that tells you what your monthly budget has to absorb. Where an award names a stipend rate, that rate is on the award's own page.
The requirements below are counted from what the awards state. They are the documents and scores that will decide whether your file is complete.
Two things follow from this. First, letters of recommendation are the single most common requirement here, and they are the one item you cannot produce yourself. Approach your referees early, give them your research direction in writing, and give them a deadline that is earlier than the real one. Second, the English test is not universal on this list. Three of the eight ask for IELTS or TOEFL. Whether you can be waived depends on the award and on your previous degree, and that detail sits on the individual award page rather than here.
The award that requires an admission offer first works in the reverse order to the rest: you secure the place, then the funding. Plan that one on a longer timeline than the others.
Four of the eight awards carry a stated date. Four are still open. Four are undated, and four recur — meaning the cycle repeats rather than closing permanently.
The busiest months across the list are October with 2 deadlines, then April and June with 1 each.
These are the awards closing soonest:
Two of these sit in October, which is the month to watch if you are planning a single application push this cycle. The Australia Awards and SINGA deadlines fall later, which gives you room to prepare a research proposal and referee letters properly rather than rushing them.
For the awards with no fixed date — the Shanghai and Beijing government scholarships among them — the cycle runs on its own schedule. The Shanghai Government Scholarship accepts applications between January and June of each year. The Beijing Government Scholarship directs you to its own page for the deadline. Treat undated awards as recurring rather than closed, and check the award page before you assume a cycle has passed.
Start with the qualification question. If you do not yet hold a master's degree, these eight awards are not the right list for you at this stage — the pathway into doctoral funding runs through a completed master's. If you do hold one, you are eligible to apply to all eight.
Then work backwards from the deadlines. October is the tightest month on this list, so if you intend to apply to the Stanford award, your referees need to be contacted now, not after you have drafted anything. For the April and June deadlines you have more time, and that time is best spent on the two items that take longest to produce: a research proposal and referee letters that say something specific about your research capacity.
Check each award's own page for the English test position before you book a test date. Three of the eight ask for IELTS or TOEFL; the others may not, and a test fee you did not need to spend is money that could have gone to transcripts and courier costs.
Finally, read the funding line on each award rather than the "fully funded" label alone. Living costs, tuition, travel, accommodation, health insurance and research costs are named by different numbers of awards on this list, and the gap between them is the gap you will be covering yourself. Knowing that before you apply is better than discovering it after an offer.
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