We list 105 phD Scholarships for Nigerian Students, with the deadline, study level and eligibility of each one taken from the award's own terms. 90 of them are fully funded. Most are held in Australia (11), China (10) and the United Kingdom (10). 63 state eligibility that includes Nigerian applicants. Awards with a known closing date are listed soonest first.
Written from the 105 awards on this page — every figure below is counted from what the awards themselves state. 6 min read.
This page collects 105 PhD scholarships open to Nigerian students. Every entry is a doctoral-level award: funded places for research degrees, not taught master's programmes and not short courses. The list sits alongside 81 master's awards, 32 bachelor's awards and 11 fellowships elsewhere on the site, but nothing here is below doctoral level.
Of the 105, 90 are labelled fully funded and 4 partially funded. The remaining 11 do not state their funding position either way in the award text, so treat those as unknown until you read the individual page. Do not assume a silent award is generous or stingy; it simply has not said.
The awards come from named providers and from national schemes. Monash University alone accounts for 5 entries. The University of Oxford accounts for 3. Others come from groups of UK universities, from participating Australian institutions, and from a Canadian institution with a quota to host Vanier scholars.
Funding language matters, and the counts below are what the awards themselves say in writing. They are not a promise that every award covers every line.
Read that list the way a doctoral candidate should. Tuition and living costs are the two lines most commonly named, and they are the two that decide whether you can actually take up a place. Travel, insurance and accommodation appear often but not universally. Research costs, which cover lab consumables, fieldwork, conference attendance or archive visits, are named by fewer awards, so if your project is expensive to run, check that line before you rank an award.
The single settling-in grant is worth noting precisely because it is rare. Most awards expect you to arrive with money for the first weeks, before any stipend payment lands.
The spread is wide. Australia leads with 11 awards, followed by China with 10, the United Kingdom with 10, the United States with 9 and Canada with 8. The United Arab Emirates has 6, Germany and Japan have 5 each, and Thailand has 5. Italy, Saudi Arabia, Singapore and Turkey have 4 each. Brazil, Denmark and Russia have 3 each. Belgium has 2.
A long tail follows, one award each: Austria, Hungary, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway, Qatar, Romania, Spain and Switzerland.
That distribution is useful when you are choosing where to apply. Australia, China, the UK, the US and Canada together hold the largest share of this list, and several of those countries run national schemes as well as university schemes. The single-award countries are not weaker options; they are simply thinner on this page, so a rejection there leaves you fewer alternatives in the same country.
Engineering is the largest single field with 13 awards, followed by medicine and health sciences with 11, arts and humanities with 10, and business and management with 9. Law and social sciences have 7 each, education has 6, and economics and finance and natural sciences have 5 each. Agriculture has 4.
Three fields appear once each: computer science and IT, energy and environment, and public policy and development. If your research sits in one of those three, this page will not carry you far on volume alone, and you should expect to search beyond it.
This is the question that decides everything else. Of the 105 awards, 63 are open to Nigerian applicants. Within that 63, 4 name Nigeria or the region explicitly, and 59 carry no nationality restriction at all.
Those two figures add up to the 63. They are not separate pools stacked on top of each other.
A further 42 awards do not state their eligibility position on the award itself. That is not a rejection. It means the page does not tell you either way, and you will need to check the provider's own rules before you spend money on transcripts or a courier.
For the pathway in: this level assumes you already hold a master's degree, in the form of an M.Sc, M.A, MBA or M.Phil. Funded doctoral places and research scholarships are often tied to a supervisor or a research group, which means the programme application and the scholarship application frequently share one deadline. Miss the programme deadline and the scholarship is gone with it.
The requirements below are counted from what the awards state. They tell you what to prepare, and roughly how often each item is asked for.
Letters of recommendation top the list, which is the practical bottleneck for most Nigerian applicants. Ask referees early, give them your CV, your proposal and the deadline in writing, and do not assume a former lecturer will remember your project from three years ago.
The English test is the second most common requirement. Where an award does not list it, that does not automatically mean a waiver applies; it means the award text does not mention it. Check the provider's own English requirements before you book a test date.
A research proposal is asked for by 32 awards, and it is the document you control most fully. Write it before you start shortlisting, not after.
Only 11 awards require an admission offer before you apply, so for most of this list the scholarship application and the programme application run in parallel. Do not wait for an offer letter that is not required.
Of the 105 awards, 33 carry a stated date, 32 are still open, and 32 recur annually. A further 72 are undated, meaning the award text does not give a closing date. Those numbers overlap by design: an award can be open, recurring and undated at once.
The busiest months are October with 8 deadlines, April with 6 and March with 4. If you are planning a cycle, October is the month to build your document timeline around.
Five awards close soonest:
One further award worth naming for a different reason is the ACI Foundation Scholarship 2026-2027 (Fellowships), which closes 1 November and is listed at undergraduate, master's, PhD and postdoctoral level.
Where an award gives a duration, the common figures are 4 years (4 awards), 3 years (2 awards) and 3 to 4 years (2 awards). One award states a fixed 3.5 years with no extension available, which is a detail to read carefully before you commit to a project that may run long.
Start with eligibility, not with prestige. Open the awards that name Nigeria or the region, then the 59 with no nationality restriction, and check each one against your degree and your field. Leave the 42 silent awards for last, and only after you have confirmed their rules on the provider's own page.
Then build your documents in the order the counts suggest. Referees first, because 57 awards want letters and referees are the slowest part. Your research proposal next, since 32 awards require one and it feeds everything else. Book an English test only after you have checked whether the specific awards you are targeting ask for it.
Finally, work backwards from October. With 8 deadlines in that month, and 32 awards still open, the applications you prepare now are the ones you will actually submit.
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