Lola Masha – Business, Tech Leader & ED at Babban Gona – is our #BellaNaijaWCW this Week

For our #BellaNaijaWCW feature today, we celebrate Lola Masha, a leader who has garnered expertise in business development, entrepreneurship, operational transformation, strategy and product development, across numerous industries including technology, financial services and energy.

She’s currently the Executive Director of Babban Gona, “an innovative Agricultural Franchise model founded to leverage the private sector to address Nigeria’s spiralling youth unemployment challenge.”

Babban Gona has a simple vision: “To make 1 million smallholder farmer members more money by 2025.”

Lola started her career as a consultant at the Chicago office of McKinsey & Company, engaging with senior management across several industries.

She moved on to a new role leading the corporate strategy team at one of Nigeria’s commercial banks.

Lola also spent 4 years at Google, leading some of the tech giant’s business development efforts in Nigeria, as well as various product partnerships across EMEA and Emerging Markets.

She later joined OLX Group, starting as Country Manager for Nigeria, and then adding SSA Product Lead to her portfolio.

Before leaving OLX Group, Lola was Director for Trust and Safety, working across over 30 OLX markets, ensuring that buyers and sellers transact safely on the platform.

Her new role at Babban Gona includes managing Finance, People, Marketing, and Business Development at the company where she’s been a board member since 2012.

She’s also a board member at Babban Gona’s parent company Doreo Partners which is “an agriculture venture capital firm that identifies and invests in visionary business models in the Nigerian agriculture industry and brings to bear deep sector expertise, strategic guidance, access to capital and operational excellence.”

Since 2017, Lola has been a board member at Descasio, a cloud computing solutions provider bridging between cloud based solutions and legacy on-premise solutions.

Lola holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Virginia; a Management of Technology degree from Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley; and Doctorate degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.

We celebrate Lola for being an industry leader, blazing the trail and inspiring women (and men) to be all they can be.