We list 63 phD Scholarships Open to Nigerian Students, with the deadline, study level and eligibility of each one taken from the award's own terms. 53 of them are fully funded. Most are held in the United States (8), China (7) and Australia (6). Awards with a known closing date are listed soonest first.
Written from the 63 awards on this page — every figure below is counted from what the awards themselves state. 5 min read.
This collection brings together 63 PhD scholarships that are open to Nigerian students. Every award here is a doctoral award, and every one of them either names Nigeria or its region as an eligible country, or sets no nationality restriction at all. Of the 63, 4 name Nigeria or the region in their own eligibility text. The remaining 59 carry no nationality restriction, which means a Nigerian applicant is not excluded by the terms as written. None of the 63 leaves eligibility unstated.
Funding is labelled on most of them. 53 are fully funded and 3 are partially funded. The remaining 7 do not label their funding either way, so this page does not claim anything about what those cover.
Where an award states its benefits in writing, here is what it names:
These are the benefits the awards themselves mention, not a promise that every funded place covers all of them. Read each award page for the exact package before you build a budget around it. A tuition waiver without a stipend still leaves you paying rent, and a stipend without tuition cover still leaves a fee bill.
The list is spread across 19 countries. The largest groups are the United States with 8, China with 7, Australia with 6, then Canada with 5, Thailand with 5 and the United Kingdom with 5. Germany, Saudi Arabia and Turkey each carry 4. Singapore and the United Arab Emirates carry 3 each, Japan 2, and Austria, Denmark, Hungary, Ireland, New Zealand, Spain and Switzerland carry 1 each.
That spread matters for how you apply. A country with several awards on the list gives you more than one route into the same system, and often more than one deadline to work with.
Engineering is the largest single field with 11 awards. Arts and Humanities and Medicine and Health Sciences follow with 8 each, then Business and Management with 7 and Law with 6. Education and Natural Sciences carry 5 each, Economics and Finance and Social Sciences 4 each, Agriculture 3, and Computer Science and IT 1.
If your research sits in a smaller field, the count is not a closed door. It means fewer awards name your subject directly, so you will need to check the broader schemes and the university-linked ones, where the field is set by the supervisor and the department rather than by the scholarship title.
The pathway into these awards is a master's degree. An M.Sc, M.A, MBA or M.Phil is the qualification that leads into doctoral study, and the awards on this page sit at PhD and doctoral level. Funded doctoral places and research scholarships often tie to a supervisor or a research group, so the programme application and the scholarship application frequently share one deadline. Treat them as one process, not two.
On requirements the awards state in writing: 32 ask for letters of recommendation, 26 ask for an English test score such as IELTS or TOEFL, 17 state a minimum degree class, 13 ask for a research proposal, 6 require an admission offer first, and 4 ask for work experience. These are what the award pages say, so plan your documents around them. Recommendation letters take the longest to gather, because your referees are writing them alongside their own work. Ask early and give them your CV, your transcript and a short note on what you are applying for.
19 awards carry a stated date. Of those, 18 are still open and 18 are recurring, meaning the scheme runs again on a cycle. 44 are undated, which usually means the deadline is set by the university department or the supervisor rather than fixed on the award page. Check those pages directly and confirm with the department.
The busiest months are April with 4, October with 4 and November with 3. The awards closing soonest are:
One further award on the list, the Hungary Government Scholarship 2026-2027, closes 15 January and covers undergraduate, master's, PhD and non-degree study.
A doctoral application is a longer piece of work than a master's application, and the documents are the reason. A research proposal is not a statement of purpose. It has to say what question you are asking, why it has not been answered, how you intend to answer it, and what your method is. If a supervisor is named on the award page, read their recent work before you write, and write to their area rather than to your general interest.
Where an English test is required, book the test before you need the score, not after. Test dates fill up, results take time to reach you, and sending an extra score report to a university costs money on top of the test fee. If you are applying to a country where your previous degree was taught in English, check whether the award accepts a waiver. Do not assume it does.
Transcripts and courier fees are the costs Nigerian applicants carry themselves. Request your transcript early from your university, confirm how many copies you need, and check whether the awarding body accepts a scanned copy at the application stage before you pay to courier a sealed envelope abroad. Degree class wording matters too: state your class exactly as your institution records it, and attach the transcript that shows it.
Start with the five awards closing soonest and check each one against your field and your documents. If none of them fits, work through the rest of the 63 by country and by field, using the counts above to see where your subject has the most openings. Where a deadline is undated, email the department or the named supervisor and ask directly. Where an award requires an admission offer first, begin the university application now, because that offer is the gate.
Keep a single folder for your CV, your transcripts, your research proposal and your referees' contact details. Most of the 63 will ask for some version of the same set, so the work you do for the first application carries into the next one.
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