We list 9 postdoctoral 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 the United States (4), Australia (2) and Germany (1). Awards with a known closing date are listed soonest first.
United States
4
Written from the 9 awards on this page — every figure below is counted from what the awards themselves state. 5 min read.
This page collects 9 postdoctoral scholarships open to Nigerian students. Every one of them is a postdoctoral award, and every one is open to Nigerian applicants. That second point matters more than it sounds. On this list, all 9 awards either name Nigeria or the wider region as eligible, or carry no nationality restriction at all, so a Nigerian passport is not the thing standing between you and an application.
The awards sit in five countries: the United States (4), Australia (2), Germany (1), Spain (1) and Switzerland (1). Providers range from Harvard University and the Swiss Government to the ACI Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy and the Forrest Research Foundation.
Postdoctoral funding is for researchers who have finished a doctorate. You already hold a PhD, and you are looking for the next position, a research fellowship or a visiting programme that lets you keep working, publish and build a track record before you go back onto the job market.
That changes what you are applying for. A postdoctoral award is not a taught programme with a syllabus. It is usually a research placement attached to a department, a supervisor or a named project, and the panel is judging your research plan and your publications rather than your WAEC results. If you are still completing your PhD, the doctoral awards on this site are the better fit; this page assumes the doctorate is done.
Funding is where the list splits. 8 of the 9 awards are labelled fully funded. 1 is labelled partially funded, and each award states its own funding position, so read the individual page rather than assuming.
Where awards name specific benefits in their own text, the pattern is:
Treat those as what the award documents say, not as a promise that every cost you carry will be met. A stipend that covers living costs in Canberra or Cambridge, Massachusetts is not the same as one that covers living costs in Ibadan. Before you accept anything, work out what the award pays against rent, feeding, local transport and the cost of flying family over, and check whether the award expects you to bring your own research funding.
The requirements named across these awards are concentrated in a few places:
The letters of recommendation are the bottleneck for most Nigerian applicants, and not because referees are unwilling. Professors move, departmental email addresses change, and a referee who agrees in September may be on sabbatical by the time the portal opens. Ask early, ask in writing, and give each referee the award name, the deadline and a one-page summary of what you are proposing so the letter is specific rather than generic.
The research proposal is the document that decides postdoctoral applications. Two awards on this list name it outright. Even where it is not listed, a postdoctoral panel will expect to see what you intend to work on, why that department, and who you want to work with.
Only one award names an English test score. Where a test is not required, do not pay for one on the assumption that it will help. Where it is required, book early: test slots in Lagos and Abuja fill up, and results take time to reach the awarding body.
One award asks for a commitment to return home afterwards. If you are applying to that one, be ready to explain what you will do with the training when you come back.
Four awards carry a stated date, and four are still open at the time of writing. Five are undated, and four run on a recurring cycle, so a deadline you missed last year is likely to return.
The busiest months are November (2), then September (1) and May (1). The awards closing soonest are:
Two other awards on the list are the Swiss Government Excellence Scholarships 2026–2027 (Fully Funded) and the Reagan Fascell Democracy Fellowship 2027 (Fully Funded). Both point you to their own pages for the deadline rather than stating a date here.
Durations vary by award: the list includes placements of 5 months, 2 years and 3 years, and one entry notes that student fellowship recipients are eligible to apply. Check the length before you commit, because a three-year fellowship and a five-month visiting placement demand very different arrangements at home.
Four awards name a field in their own text: Engineering (1), Law (1), Natural Sciences (1) and Social Sciences (1). The rest are not tied to a single discipline on the face of the listing, which means a chemist, an economist and a legal scholar may all find something here, but you will have to open each page to confirm the fit.
Note also that several of these awards are open at more than one level. Six of the nine are also listed as fellowships, six as PhD opportunities, four as Masters and three as Bachelors. If you supervise students or teach in a department, that overlap is worth passing on.
Start with the two November deadlines, since they are the nearest. Read the ACI Foundation and Schlumberger Foundation pages first, confirm you meet the postdoctoral requirement, and check whether the funding on offer is full or partial before you invest time in a proposal.
Then work backwards from the deadline rather than forwards from today. A postdoctoral application typically needs a research proposal, two or three referee letters and certified copies of your doctoral certificate and transcript. In Nigeria, transcript requests and courier delivery take weeks, not days, and the cost comes out of your pocket. Request documents the moment you decide to apply, not the week the portal closes.
If nothing on this list fits your field or your timing, the doctoral and fellowship pages on this site carry the awards that sit one step below this level, and the recurring deadlines mean several of these will open again.
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