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  Omobola Olubusola Johnson was born on the 28th of June 1963. She is a Nigerian technocrat and the Honorary Chairperson of the global Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI). She is also a former and first Minister of Communication Technology in the cabinet of President Goodluck Jonathan.
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Education

She was educated at the International School Ibadan and the University of Manchester (BEng, Electrical and Electronic Engineering) and King’s College London (MSc, Digital Electronics). She has a Doctorate in Business Administration (DBA) from Cranfield University.

Career

Prior to her Ministerial appointment, she was country managing director for Accenture, Nigeria. She had worked with Accenture since 1985 when it was Andersen Consulting. She joined Accenture, an international management consulting firm in 1985 and served for twenty-five years – five of these as Country Managing Director. Omobola has over 25 years of consulting experience and has worked with a cross-section of companies in a variety of industries, successfully transforming them into more competitive and dynamic organisations. Johnson co-founded a women’s organization, WIMBIZ in 2001. Women in Management and Business (WIMBIZ) a non-governmental organisation that seeks to improve the success rate of female entrepreneurs and increase the proportion of women in senior positions in corporate organisations. She has earned several public commendations since taking up her first government assignment as a minister in 2011. This is following the numerous achievements of her ministry notably among which is the launch of the NigComSat-IR Satellite. This has helped to complement the country’s efforts at fibre connectivity and the provision of greater bandwidth. The ministry under her watch has also deployed more than 700 personal computers to secondary schools in the first phase of School Access Programme (SAP) while about 193 tertiary institutions in the country now have internet access in the Tertiary Institution Access Programme (TIAP) and 146 communities have access to Community Communication Centers deployed around the country.
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Other achievements of the ministry under Johnson include:

A collaboration with the Central Bank of Nigeria to drive digital and financial inclusion using the Post Office infrastructure; 10Gbs Fibre optic Network to connect Nigerian Universities to the wider research and education universe, in partnership with the NUC, World Bank and TetFund; Facilitating e-Government drive with over 86,000 email addresses deployed for Government use on the .gov.ng domain names, and 250 websites hosted on .gov.ng platform as well as 382 MDAs connected in Abuja and other parts of the country; Creating the enabling environment for local development of iPad-equivalent tablets; Signing of an MoU with Nokia to establish a lab in Nigeria to support the domestic mobile software industry; Inauguration of the National Council on Information Communication Technology with state / FCT Commissioner of ICT as members. On 30 May 2013, Omobola presented the Nigerian National Broadband Plan for 2013 to 2018 to President Goodluck Jonathan. Following a minor cabinet reshuffle In September 2013 by President Goodluck Jonathan, she was given an extra task of supervising the operations of the Federal Ministry of Science and Technology. Omobola is currently a non-executive director of Guinness Nigeria PLC and MTN and Chairperson of Custodian and Allied Insurance Limited.

Additional Information on Omobola Johnson

Johnson is the pioneer head of the country’s communication technology ministry, which was created as part of the transformation agenda of the Nigerian government. She is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Africa, and UNDP’s closed high-level Broadband Commission Working Group on Gender whose main objective is to promote the empowerment and digital inclusion of women. She is also an appointed member of the International Telecommunication Union’s m-Powering Development Advisory Board charged with extending the benefits of mobile technology to all strata of society, in order to build a truly inclusive information society, with special focus on remote rural and underserved areas. Sources: Fbnquest Wikipedia Featured Image Source: Guinness Nigeria
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This article was first published on 20th October 2020

jeremiah

Jeremiah is a scholar and a poet. He has a keen eye for studying the world and is passionate about people. He tweets at @jeremiahaluwong.


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One thought on “Women You Should Know: Omobola Johnson”


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