INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY SPECIAL: Celebrating Nigerian Women Shaping the Future of CSR and Sustainability in Africa

As the world marks International Women’s Day, CSR REPORTERS celebrates the Nigerian women whose leadership, consistency, and courage are redefining what responsible business looks like in Africa.

Across Nigeria and Africa, sustainability and corporate responsibility are being shaped not just by policy mandates or investor pressure — but by a growing generation of women who have made accountability their life’s work. These are professionals who have spent years not just talking about responsible business, but building the frameworks, mentoring the next generation, and holding institutions accountable.

This International Women’s Day, CSR REPORTERS recognises six Nigerian women whose contributions to CSR, ESG, and sustainability deserve more than a passing mention. Their work is not performative. It is institutional, impactful, and in several cases, globally recognised.

They sit in boardrooms and in communities. They lead in corporate hallways and on international platforms. And they are, collectively, proof that responsible leadership in Africa does have a face — and increasingly, it is female.

Damilola Ogunbiyi

CEO, Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL) | UN Special Representative for Sustainable Energy

If there is one Nigerian woman whose sustainability work has registered on the global stage with undeniable force, it is Damilola Ogunbiyi. Named to the Forbes 2025 Sustainability Leaders list — one of only 50 global figures so recognised — and to the TIME100 Climate list in 2024 as one of the 20 titans in climate, Ogunbiyi has become the most internationally visible Nigerian voice in the energy transition space.

Before ascending to her current UN role, she blazed trails at home — becoming the first female Managing Director of the Nigerian Rural Electrification Agency and the first female General Manager of the Lagos State Electricity Board. Under her leadership at the REA, she negotiated a $550 million joint World Bank and African Development Bank facility that has since delivered energy access to millions of Nigerians.

At SEforALL, she has helped secure commitments of over $1.6 trillion in energy finance, supported more than 100 countries, and co-chaired Mission 300 — an ambitious initiative to electrify 300 million Africans by 2030. Her work is a masterclass in what African leadership on sustainability can look like when it is grounded in technical expertise, political will, and genuine commitment to equity.

Ini Abimbola

Founder & Lead Consultant, ThistlePraxis Consulting | Vice President, Sustainability Professionals Institute of Nigeria (SPIN)

Few people in Nigeria can claim to have helped build the architecture of the country’s sustainability profession the way Ini Abimbola has. Since founding ThistlePraxis Consulting in 2010, she has spent over two decades working at the intersection of corporate governance, sustainability strategy, and responsible business — long before these topics entered mainstream Nigerian corporate conversation.

A Stanford Draper Hills Fellow and Harvard Business School Executive Education alumna, Ini was one of the founding voices behind both the Association of Sustainability Professionals of Nigeria (ASPN) and what is now the Sustainability Professionals Institute of Nigeria (SPIN), where she serves as Vice President. In that role, she has helped induct hundreds of sustainability professionals into the institute — building the human infrastructure the sector needs.

She has also been a consistent media voice through CSR Files™ Weekly, a column she pioneered with The Guardian Nigeria in 2012, dedicated to challenging and advancing the conversation on corporate responsibility across Africa. As a board retreat facilitator, C-suite trainer, and multi-stakeholder engagement expert, Ini Abimbola is one of the most complete sustainability professionals Nigeria has produced.

Eunice Sampson

Associate Partner, EY Climate Change & Sustainability | Former GM/Head of Sustainability, Dangote Cement Plc | Director of Learning & Development, SPIN

Eunice Sampson’s career reads like a blueprint for what building institutional sustainability leadership looks like from the inside out. With over 20 years of experience spanning financial services, heavy industry, and professional services, she is among Nigeria’s most decorated sustainability practitioners.

At Zenith Bank, she spent nearly 15 years developing and leading the bank’s sustainability and CSR functions. At Dangote Cement — one of Africa’s largest industrial corporations — she rose to General Manager and Group Head of Sustainability, overseeing the company’s seven-pillar sustainability framework across multiple African countries, and earning the SERAS CSR/Sustainability Professional of the Year award in 2020.

She then brought this wealth of corporate experience to EY, where she joined as Director of Climate Change & Sustainability for West Africa and was promoted to Associate Partner — a testament to her impact within one of the world’s most prestigious professional services firms. An ISO-26000 and ISO-45001 certified Lead Implementer and Doctorate student in Sustainable Development and Diplomacy, Eunice Sampson is a rare combination of technical expert, institutional builder, and quiet but consistent force in Nigeria’s sustainability landscape.

Dr. Mories Atoki

CEO, African Business Coalition for Health (ABCHealth) | Legal Director, SPIN | Former Sustainability Lead, PwC Nigeria

Dr. Mories Atoki is one of Nigeria’s most distinctive voices in sustainability — because she arrived at it through a path that most would not expect: law. Trained as a lawyer with degrees in Law and Business Administration, she brings a rigour to sustainability practice that is rooted in governance, legal frameworks, and institutional accountability.

At PricewaterhouseCoopers, she led the Sustainability and Climate Change practice in Nigeria, driving private sector engagement on SDGs and building the firm’s sustainability advisory capability. She went on to serve as CEO of the African Business Coalition for Health — a role that married her sustainability expertise with a deeply personal commitment to healthcare equity on the continent, driven in part by her own experience of the inadequacies of maternal healthcare in Nigeria.

A Harvard Business School certificate holder in Innovating for Sustainability, a member of the Nigerian Bar Association, and a Fellow of SPIN and ASPN, Dr. Atoki currently serves as Legal Director at SPIN — shaping the governance and regulatory thinking that underpins Nigeria’s emerging sustainability profession. Her call to action is consistent: Africa must stop adopting templates from the global north and build sustainability solutions that reflect African realities.

Engr. Lovelyn Okoye

Head of Sustainability, Seven-Up Bottling Company (SBC) | Sustainability Influencer & Advocate

Engr. Lovelyn Okoye represents a profile that CSR REPORTERS has always championed: the practitioner who does the work not for titles, but for transformation. With over 12 years of experience spanning Dangote Cement, Nestle, and now Seven-Up Bottling Company, she has embedded sustainability into some of Nigeria’s most consequential industrial operations.

At Dangote Cement, she served as Group Sustainability and Environment Manager before joining SBC as Senior Sustainability Manager — and most recently Head of Sustainability. In that role, she has been at the centre of SBC’s Green Skills Bootcamp, a 2025 initiative that engaged students, educators, and environmental advocates on plastic waste, circular economy principles, and green innovation, creating measurable capability for the next generation of Nigerian sustainability practitioners.

Beyond her corporate role, Lovelyn is a public speaker, mentor, and what she describes as a sustainability influencer — working through seminars, policy dialogues, and community campaigns to inspire especially young women to pursue careers in engineering, science, and sustainability. She is a Member of the Nigerian Environmental Society and holds multiple international certifications including NEBOSH in Occupational Health and Safety. Her work represents the bridge between corporate sustainability and community impact that Nigeria desperately needs more of.

Omobolanle Victor-Laniyan

Head of Sustainability, Access Bank Plc | Director of Marketing & Organisational Communications, SPIN

Access Bank is one of Nigeria’s — and Africa’s — most sustainability-active financial institutions, and much of that reputation has been built and maintained under the consistent leadership of Omobolanle Victor-Laniyan. As Head of Sustainability at one of the continent’s largest banks, she has overseen sustainability frameworks that span environmental management, community investment, gender inclusion, and ESG reporting.

Her work at Access Bank reflects an understanding that sustainability in financial services is not merely about reducing the bank’s own footprint — it is about using the power of capital flows to drive responsible business behaviour across the wider economy. In a banking sector where sustainability is increasingly linked to credit decisions, investor ratings, and regulatory compliance, Victor-Laniyan’s role is as strategic as it is moral.

She also serves on the Board of SPIN as Director of Marketing and Organisational Communications — contributing her institutional knowledge and platform reach to the broader effort of professionalising sustainability in Nigeria. Her career is a demonstration that corporate sustainability, done with consistency and intent, is itself a form of institutional leadership.

What These Women Have in Common

What unites these six women is not that they attended the same conferences or hold the same certifications — although several do. What unites them is a refusal to treat sustainability as a peripheral activity.

They have each, in their own way, pushed their organisations, their sectors, and sometimes their country, to take responsibility more seriously. They have built capacity where none existed, held institutions accountable when it was uncomfortable, and mentored the next generation when it would have been easier not to.

In environments where trust is fragile and impact matters most, that kind of leadership is not just admirable. It is essential.

CSR REPORTERS commends each of these women — and the many others across Nigeria and Africa whose work goes unrecognised — for their dedication to a more responsible, more accountable, and more sustainable Africa. On this International Women’s Day, and every day after it, their example deserves to be seen, studied, and followed.