Energy, Gender & Development Attorney Adaku Ufere-Awoonor is our #BellaNaijaWCW this Week!

#BellaNaijaWCW feature today celebrates Adaku Ufere-Awoonor, an international oil and gas, gender and development lawyer with over a decade of experience in legal and business advisory in the oil an gas, power, mining and extractive industries.

She’s led multicultural and multilingual teams across Africa in the structuring, negotiation and implementation of oil & gas, power, gender, mining, infrastructure and energy policy projects in Africa.

She’s the CEO and Principal Consultant at DAX Consult, which provides legal and business advisory services in energy, gender, infrastructure and development.

Adaku was inspired to go into Oil and Gas law when Nigeria appointed its first female Minister of Petroleum Resources. So after one year as an associate at a law firm, she went on to get a masters degree in Oil and Gas law from University of Aberdeen. She’d bagged a Bachelors degree in law from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka in 2007.

The award-winning lawyer describes herself as passionate about girls’ education, gender equality, women empowerment, advancing women in leadership positions and eliminating gender-based violence.

Adaku is currently the Head of Legal at STER Initiative, a Not-for-Profit organization advocating against sexual violence, providing prevention mechanisms and supporting survivors with psychosocial services.

In 2016, Adaku was named as one of Nigeria’s 40 Under 40 Leading Lawyers by the Nigerian Legal Awards and was recognised as the 2017 Attorney of the Year at the African Legal Awards.

Adaku is also a graduate of the Young Women in African Power programme presented by the Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI) Regional Leadership Centre for Southern Africa (RLC-SA) at the University of South Africa (Unisa). The programme supports the career development of a new generation of women leaders in the energy sector.

She was named Young African Professional of the Year at the 2018 African Leadership Awards and Nation Building Series.

She is a 2018 Mandela Washington Fellow and one of the women in Leading Ladies Africa’s “100 Most Inspiring Women” for 2019 list.

We celebrate Adaku for following her passion and excelling in it, thus becoming an inspiration to others.