PhD in France for African Students: Funding and Entry

How a PhD works in France

The degree is the Doctorat and it runs 3–6 years, starting in September, October. The national framework, the arrêté of 25 May 2016, sets three years of full-time research as the norm and six as the outer limit. Extensions are granted for disability, for maternity, paternity, adoption or parental leave, for medical leave of more than four months and for work-accident leave of two months or more, plus a one-off suspension of up to a year that does not count towards the total.

France runs structured doctoral programmes rather than a supervisor-only apprenticeship. You are attached to an école doctorale, which must approve your supervisor and your subject before you can enrol, and which sets the training and annual reporting you complete alongside the thesis. Registration is annual: you re-enrol and pay the fee each year until the defence. The doctorate carries no ECTS of its own.

English-only doctorates are available at most universities (yes): the école doctorale and the laboratory set the working language, not a national rule. French still governs the prefecture, the enrolment desk and most of the life around the lab.

How PhDs are funded — and what you are paid

The main instrument is the contrat doctoral, a three-year fixed-term employment contract extendable twice by up to a year each time, and the ministry’s named principal support. On research-only duties it pays €2,200 per month gross, in force since 1 January 2025. No official net figure is published, and social contributions come off that. You are an employee, not a scholarship holder.

The other named routes are CIFRE industrial research conventions, employer funding in the public and private sectors, co-financing, regional funding, research organisations and foundations, the European Industrial Doctorate under the Marie Curie actions, and foreign government scholarships. Science and technology doctoral schools generally require the funding to be secured before enrolment; humanities and social science schools may admit a self-funded candidate, which means carrying €600–800 per month yourself for three years or more. City-by-city figures are on our France cost of study page.

Doctoral candidates are excluded from the non-EU differentiated fees that apply to the Licence and the Master, so you pay the national doctoral registration fee of €398 per year and the CVEC of €105 per year — the same as a French candidate. Taught degrees are a different matter: see master’s in France.

The national scheme that reaches doctorates is the Eiffel Excellence Scholarship Programme, paying €1,200–2,100 per month, with 433 awards a year and an age limit of 35. Your institution nominates you; you cannot apply yourself, and you need the admission first. Nigeria, Ghana, Egypt, Uganda and Zambia are eligible across the scheme, while Kenya, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Morocco are restricted to particular calls. Erasmus Mundus funds joint master’s degrees only, not doctorates. See France scholarships.

Entry requirements for a PhD

The entry qualification is the diplôme national de master or another diploma conferring the grade de master — in practice a completed two-year master’s. The head of the institution can admit a candidate without one by derogation, on the doctoral school council’s advice, where an equivalent level of study or validated professional experience is shown.

An African master’s is judged by the institution, not by a national equivalence table. Centre ENIC-NARIC France (part of France Éducation international) issues an attestation de comparabilité, which Campus France says is not an equivalence in itself; the école doctorale decides. Apostille is the route for South Africa and Morocco (yes); the other seven countries need full consular legalisation.

What decides your case is the thesis project, not the transcript. You need a subject a named supervisor has agreed to take and a proposal the école doctorale will approve; Eiffel adds a thesis project assessed by an external expert. There is no national language floor — the visa sets no language condition and each programme decides. Where a test is asked for, IELTS 6.5 is the usual postgraduate floor.

Universities and doctoral schools to look at

Université PSL (#34 (QS 2027)) is the highest-ranked institution in the dataset and runs doctoral work in English across many of its schools, in physics, chemistry, mathematics, engineering and economics, at €398 per year.

Université Paris-Saclay (#76 (QS 2027)) is the engineering, computer science and data science campus, with many English-taught doctoral programmes and the same €398 per year fee. Sorbonne University (#73 (QS 2027)) covers medicine, engineering, life sciences and humanities across 53,000 students, also at €398 per year.

Université Paris Cité (#300 (QS 2026)) is the Paris choice for medicine, pharmacy, public health and psychology, at €398 per year. Université Grenoble Alpes (#387 (QS 2027)) pairs engineering, physics and environmental science with the lowest living costs of the large campuses, €600–1,000 per month, and charges €397 per year.

University of Strasbourg (#456 (QS 2027)) is strong in chemistry, materials and physics and teaches widely in English. University of Lille (#686 (QS 2027)) applies an automatic fee waiver to non-EU doctoral candidates, so you pay €397 per year on living costs of €650–1,300 per month.

For business research the two names are HEC Paris, where doctoral tuition is free for every admitted candidate, and ESSEC, at €1,200–10,000 per year, which admits no doctoral student without full funding. Profiles are on our French universities page.

How to apply for a PhD in France

1. Start in January of the second year of your master’s. That is Campus France’s own advice, and it is roughly eighteen months before an October start.
2. Find a subject and a supervisor. Thesis offers are published on doctorat.gouv.fr, the national doctorate platform, and on Campus France’s doctorate platform; lab and école doctorale pages carry the rest. Write to the named researcher, not to an admissions office.
3. Agree the subject and draft the proposal with that supervisor. Nothing moves until a researcher has said yes in writing.
4. Apply for funding. Doctoral-school contract competitions run roughly April to June for a 1 October start; CIFRE conventions, employer funding and foreign government scholarships run on their own calendars, and Eiffel is submitted by the institution.
5. Get the école doctorale to approve the supervisor and the subject, then enrol. Enrolment outside a funded competition can be arranged at other points in the year.
6. Legalise your documents. South African and Moroccan degrees are apostilled; the other seven origins need the full consular chain, which takes weeks per document.
7. File through Études en France if you live in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Egypt, South Africa or Morocco. Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe apply to the institution and the consulate directly.
8. Lodge the visa, give biometrics and pay the fee of €50–99. The steps are set out in France student visa requirements.

Visa, family and life as a doctoral candidate

Most candidates travel on the VLS-TS étudiant, the long-stay visa that works as a residence permit. A candidate hosted under a convention de séjour de recherche — available where a foreign government or institution, or the French foreign ministry, has awarded funding on scientific criteria — gets the multi-year talent – chercheur card instead, which lets family members obtain associated permits and allows supplementary activities linked to the research. Candidates who cannot meet the resource threshold take the ordinary student visa.

The money test is €877.50 per month; a contrat doctoral payslip clears it outright. Decisions take 2–7 weeks, and the OFII stay tax of €100 is paid on arrival. Paid work outside the contract is capped at 964 hours/year (60% of the 1,607-hour annual legal working time) — an annual cap, not split into term-time/holiday allowances. After the defence you may stay 12 months on the APS, for €150, to look for work or start a business.