We list 18 postdoctoral Scholarships for Nigerian Students, with the deadline, study level and eligibility of each one taken from the award's own terms. 16 of them are fully funded. Most are held in the United States (7), Australia (2) and Brazil (2). 9 state eligibility that includes Nigerian applicants. Awards with a known closing date are listed soonest first.
Written from the 18 awards on this page — every figure below is counted from what the awards themselves state. 5 min read.
This page collects 18 postdoctoral awards open to researchers who already hold a doctorate. The brief behind it describes the level plainly: postdoctoral positions, research fellowships and visiting programmes for researchers who have completed a doctorate. If you have finished a Ph.D and are looking for a funded research stay abroad, this is the list to work through.
The awards are not all the same shape. Some are pure research fellowships. Some are attached to a university department and expect you to work within an existing group. A few sit inside larger scholarship programmes that also fund Master's and Ph.D students, with a postdoctoral strand running alongside. Reading the individual award page matters more here than at any other level, because the terms differ so much between one fellowship and the next.
The United States dominates the list with 7 awards. After that the spread is thin: Australia and Brazil have 2 each, and Austria, Canada, Germany, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates have 1 each.
That concentration is worth thinking about before you start. A postdoctoral move is usually tied to a supervisor, a lab or a research centre, so the country list is really a list of places where somebody has already put money on the table for a visiting researcher. If your work fits one of the single-award countries, you are competing for one slot in one programme, so the fit has to be close.
Of the 18 awards, 16 are labelled fully funded and 1 is labelled partially funded. One award does not label its funding either way.
Where the award text names a benefit, the counts look like this:
These are what the awards say in writing, not a promise that every line will be covered in your case. Read them as a checklist to compare against. Travel appearing more often than accommodation tells you something practical: a fellowship may fly you to the host country and leave you to sort housing from the stipend. Research or training costs appearing in only 5 awards means that in most cases, consumables, fieldwork and conference travel are coming out of your own allowance unless the award page says otherwise.
9 of the 18 awards are ones a Nigerian researcher may apply for. Within that group of 9, none names Nigeria or the African region specifically, and all 9 carry no nationality restriction at all. For all 9, eligibility is not stated on the award itself.
That last point deserves emphasis. When a page does not state eligibility, it does not mean you qualify. It means the information is not on the award listing we hold. Before you spend money on transcripts or a courier, open the award page and look for the funder's own eligibility wording. Where a fellowship is tied to a named university department, the department's rules usually decide who can hold it.
The remaining awards either restrict by nationality, by the host institution's own recruitment rules, or by a condition we cannot confirm from the listing. Treat the 9 as your starting set and work outwards from there.
The requirements the awards state most often are:
Letters of recommendation are the single most common demand, and at postdoctoral level they carry more weight than your transcript. The people writing them need to be able to speak to your research, not just your coursework. Give them at least a month, send your proposal draft and your CV, and be specific about what the fellowship asks them to address.
Only 2 awards ask for IELTS or TOEFL. If you did your Ph.D in English, or your previous degree was taught in English, check the award page before booking a test — you may not need one. A test slot costs money and time you could put into the proposal.
Only 2 awards state a minimum degree class. At this level that is expected: the doctorate is the qualification that matters, and the funder is judging your publication record and research plan instead.
9 awards carry a date and 9 are still open. Another 9 are undated, and 9 recur — meaning the same programme opens again on a cycle, so a missed round is not always a closed door.
The busiest months across the list are November and June, with 2 deadlines each, followed by September with 1. The awards closing soonest are:
Two of those close within about a month of each other in October and November, which is the tightest stretch on the calendar. If you are aiming at either, the recommendation letters are the bottleneck, not the form.
The field tags on this list are spread thinly: Arts & Humanities, Engineering, Law, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences each appear on 1 award. That is not a sign that postdoctoral funding is scarce in your field. It reflects how these awards are tagged, and many of them are open to a range of disciplines even where only one tag is applied.
On duration, 3 awards run for 3 years, 1 runs for 2 years, and 1 runs for 1 to ten months. One fellowship year is described as running from 1 July to 30 June of the following year. Durations are not stated for the rest.
Start with the five awards closing soonest, since those are the ones where a decision is still possible this cycle. For each, confirm two things on the award page before you commit money: whether a Nigerian applicant is eligible, and whether the funding covers what you actually need. Then line up your referees early — 12 of these awards want recommendation letters, and that is the part of the application you cannot rush.
If nothing on the near list fits, work through the undated and recurring awards. A recurring programme that has already closed will open again, and the intervening months are the right time to draft the research proposal that 6 of these awards ask for. Two named providers on this list are Harvard University and the Swiss Government / Swiss Universities, alongside funders such as The American Association of University Women, the Sheikh Saud bin Saqr Al Qasimi Foundation for Policy Research, the Clark Art Institute and the ACI Foundation. Check each funder's own page for the eligibility wording the listing does not carry.
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