Fully Funded Master’s Degrees: Where They Hide and How to Win One

The Four Families of Full Funding

Full funding comes in four shapes: prestigious government scholarships (Chevening, Commonwealth, Fulbright), multi-country programmes (Erasmus Mundus, DAAD), university-level awards (deans' scholarships, departmental awards), and work-for-funding arrangements (graduate assistantships, mostly in the US). Each has different odds and different timelines — a serious applicant mixes at least two families.

Government Scholarships: Prestigious but Crowded

The Commonwealth Scholarship funds full master's study in the UK for students from Commonwealth countries, with a focus on development impact. Chevening funds one-year UK master's degrees and requires two years of work experience. Fulbright serves US-bound students. These are wonderful but attract tens of thousands of applicants. Apply — but never make them your only plan.

Erasmus Mundus: The Underrated Giant

The EU's Erasmus Mundus Joint Masters pay tuition, travel, and a monthly stipend while you study in two or three European countries. There are more than 150 programmes across every field, and each admits a healthy share of African students. The catalogue opens applications roughly October to January for courses starting the following autumn. Because each programme is its own competition, applying to three well-matched programmes multiplies your odds.

US Assistantships: Funding You Work For

In the United States, many master's and most PhD students are funded through teaching or research assistantships: tuition waived plus a living stipend in exchange for roughly 20 hours of weekly work. These are awarded by departments, not central scholarship offices. The winning move is to email professors whose research matches yours before you apply, with a short, specific message and your CV. Generic mass emails get deleted; specific ones get read.

DAAD and Country Programmes

Germany's DAAD scholarships fund development-related master's courses with a monthly stipend of around 992 euros, and German public universities charge little or no tuition anyway. Similar national programmes exist in the Netherlands (Orange Knowledge successor programmes), Sweden (SI Scholarships), and Japan (MEXT). These favour applicants with two or more years of work experience and a clear development story.

What Winners Do Differently

• They start 12 to 18 months early, before essays are due.
• They apply to 6 to 10 funding routes, not 2.
• They tailor every essay to the funder's actual selection criteria.
• They quantify impact: "trained 40 students" beats "passionate about education".
• They collect documents once — transcripts, references, English tests — and reuse them across applications.

A Word About Fees and Fraud

Legitimate scholarships never charge application fees through agents, and nobody can "guarantee" you an award for a payment. If an offer sounds too easy, verify it on the funder's official website. Real funding is won with strong applications, not shortcuts — and Nigerian students win these awards every single year. For one-on-one help building a scholarship strategy, see our Scholarship Guidance service.