Five of the biggest scholarships have no nationality rule at all

Our scholarships abroad dataset holds twelve fully funded postgraduate awards an African student can apply for. Seven of them check your nationality before they check anything else. Five never ask at all, and those five are among the largest on the list: Knight-Hennessy at Stanford, the Clarendon Fund at Oxford, Gates Cambridge, Erasmus Mundus, and Schwarzman Scholars at Tsinghua.

That split is worth knowing before you start, because the phrase most people search is 'scholarships for African students', and it quietly hides the awards with no filter on the door. Open to any nationality does not mean easier. It means no eligibility page will ever tell you that you belong there, so the decision to apply has to come from you.

The five that never ask

None of these five carries a nationality condition. Gates Cambridge is the only one with any passport rule at all, and it runs the other way: it is open to everyone except UK 🇬🇧 citizens.

• · Knight-Hennessy Scholars funds up to three years of any Stanford graduate programme, from law and medicine to engineering and business. No citizenship or residency restrictions. You must hold a recent bachelor's degree and be admitted to a Stanford programme in the ordinary way.
• · Clarendon Fund awards around 200 new fully funded places a year at Oxford, with no quotas by nationality or by degree. There is no separate form. Apply for your course by its December or January funding deadline and you are considered automatically.
• · Gates Cambridge offers about 80 full-cost awards a year for any Cambridge postgraduate degree. It was set up in October 2000 with a $210m donation from the Gates Foundation, still the largest single gift a UK 🇬🇧 university has received.
• · Erasmus Mundus Joint Masters covers a Master's delivered across a consortium of at least two European universities, with a full tuition waiver and a stipend of up to €1,400 a month. African applicants come in as partner-country students, which carries higher travel and installation support.
• · Schwarzman Scholars is a one-year funded Master's in Global Affairs at Tsinghua in Beijing, China 🇨🇳, open to any nationality aged 18 to 28. Up to 200 scholars are chosen each year.

The seven that ask where you are from

The other seven are scoped, though most of the scoping is wide rather than narrow. Chevening and the Commonwealth Master's Scholarships cover most African countries. Fulbright runs country-by-country competitions through US 🇺🇸 embassies. DAAD's EPOS programme is open to graduates from developing and newly industrialised countries with at least two years of work behind them, and Australia Awards covers a published list of African countries with a condition attached: you go home for two years afterwards.

Only two of the twelve are built specifically for Africans. The Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program at Cambridge requires you to be from and living in an African country, and encourages women, refugees, internally displaced people and people with disabilities to apply. The Rhodes Scholarship runs through African constituencies rather than a single continental pool, which is where its own deadlines get complicated.

What is closing next

Three dates are close enough to matter this month. Rhodes runs a separate competition per constituency and the West Africa round closes on 27 August 2026 at 23:59 GMT, so check your own constituency rather than assuming a single date. Schwarzman closes on 9 September 2026. Knight-Hennessy closes on 6 October 2026 for the 2027 cohort.

Chevening is the one to watch rather than diarise. Its 2026 to 2027 round has closed and the next set of dates has not been published, so a date you find on an aggregator for the coming round is a guess. Fulbright, DAAD, the Commonwealth Master's and Australia Awards all run to national timetables that move, which is why our dataset leaves their deadline empty rather than inventing one.

Rhodes, and a sentence argued over for a century

Cecil Rhodes died in 1902 and left a will funding scholarships at Oxford worth £300 a year each. One clause in it reads: 'No student shall be qualified or disqualified for election to a scholarship on account of his race or religious opinions.' Another clause says the awards are for male students.

Both sentences have been fought over ever since, and the fight is the interesting part. The race clause did not stop the scholarship being read as a white one for decades, though Alain Locke, later the writer at the centre of the Harlem Renaissance, was elected from the United States 🇺🇸 in 1907. The word 'male' held until 1977, and removing it took an Act of Parliament. In 2015 the Rhodes Must Fall campaign, which began at the University of Cape Town in South Africa 🇿🇦 and moved to Oriel College, put the man's colonial record and his statue back in public argument.

The Trust today awards 20 scholarships a year to students in Africa through six constituencies: East Africa, Kenya 🇰🇪, Southern Africa, West Africa, Zambia 🇿🇲 and Zimbabwe 🇿🇼. It covers all fees plus a stipend, listed in our dataset at about £20,400 a year.

What fully funded actually covers

Every award in the dataset is marked Full, which means tuition and a living stipend. It does not always mean the flight, the visa fee, the health surcharge or the money you need in a bank account before a consulate will look at you. Those are the costs that catch people, and they land months before the first stipend does.

A funded place also does not remove the visa question. Study visas sit outside the visa rules we track for ordinary travel, but the same passport hierarchy runs underneath both, and it is the reason what a Nigerian passport gets you is worth reading before you pick a country. Budget for the paperwork as seriously as you budget for the application.