John Ndubuisi of Union Bank of Nigeria
SIX AFRICAN professionals have been honouredwith a place on the prestigious Future50 list by the Project Management Institute (PMI) – a growing global community of millions of project professionals across the globe – for their efforts at reshaping the future through projects.
The list features 50 outstanding rising leaders transforming the world through their work while driving transformation across all PMI regions and industries.
They are Aisha Garba, Senior Education Specialist, World Bank; Tosin Oshinowo, Director and Principal Architect, cmDesign Atelier; John Ndubuisi, Senior Project Manager, IT Programs and Portfolio Management, Union Bank, Nigeria and Kathleen Siminyu, Kiswahili Machine Learning Fellow, Mozilla Foundation.
The others are Manuel Praia, Business Intelligence Support Project Manager, Unitel, Angola; and Abdalah Maiguizo, Project Director, Millennium Challenge Account, Niger.
Congratulating the F50s, George Asamani, MD, Sub Saharan Africa, PMI, said, “We remain committed to equipping the youth with the knowledge, skills and tools needed to not only embrace change but also to be the drivers of it. Your achievements today are a testament to Africa’s incredible talent and potential.”
“You are the architects of the future, and your vision and determination will undoubtedly lead us to new heights and amplify the community’s impact,” he said.
Aisha Garba, who leads a 10-person team behind the Adolescent Girls Initiative for Learning and Empowerment (AGILE), was recognized for her works in combating a myriad of challenges facing the adolescent Nigerian girl such as difficulty in completing secondary education; pervasive poverty, poor infrastructure, and forced early marriage; while paving the way to increased economic opportunities that would benefit all of Nigeria.
Ms. Tosin Oshinowo was recognized for her latest project, designing a new village for Nigerians displaced by violent insurgents. She is credited for working to provide a new path forward in architecture after Boko Haram launched a brutal attack on Ngarannam, Nigeria, in 2015 which led to residents who fled, spending years in refugee camps.
After startup, Titan Trust Bank acquired century-old Union Bank in 2022, John Ndubuisi was tapped to lead a project to merge capabilities and help ensure the company doesn’t get left behind as the industry hurtles toward its fintech future.
Mr. Ndubuisi, who has over the past decade been working to advance the frontiers of fintech in Nigeria,
is credited for building a team that enabled Union Bank iterate its way to the top of the Nigerian banking industry.
Kathleen Siminyu leads a project at the Mozilla Foundation to help computers understand Kiswahili as it’s spoken and written. There are more than 200 million Kiswahili speakers, and by annotating the language for various machine-learning tasks, Siminyu’s team is building speech transcription models that help level the playing field.
Manuel Praia, who has spent more than a decade leading IT initiatives, including currently as Business Intelligence Support Project Manager at Angola’s largest mobile operator, Unitel.
He is credited for founding Portal PMO Angola, a website that quickly blossomed into a bustling virtual gathering place for project professionals to share project news and skills-building knowledge from and for the Angola community in 2020.
Abdalah Maiguizo was tapped to join one of the core pieces of the Niger Compact program, the Climate-Resilient Communities (CRC) project, aimed to benefit more than 3.5 million people through a mix of livestock vaccination and agricultural reclamation activities.
BY Nii Adjei Mensahfio