Nigerian techpreneur and CEO of Bookings Africa, Fade Ogunro puts Nigeria on the map with her most recent appointment as a member of the Global Campaign Board for The Cherie Blair Foundation for Women, making her the first African and Nigerian woman to become part of the organization’s board.
The Foundation was set up by Cherie Blair CBE QC to help release the potential of women entrepreneurs in low and middle-income countries and close the global gender gap in entrepreneurship. Since its inception in 2008, the Foundation has directly supported over 175,000 women across more than 100 countries.
Through its combined approach of programmatic delivery and advocacy, the Foundation supports women to start and grow successful micro, small and medium businesses, with training, technology, mentoring and networking at the heart of its work.
This opens doors to finance, markets, contacts and more and empowers women to create better futures for themselves and their families, enable their communities to prosper, contribute to strong economies, and move the world in a whole new direction.
Nigeria is one of the key countries of operation: The Foundation reached 11,300 women entrepreneurs in Nigeria over 2020 through its business skills learning app, HerVenture, which was made possible by its partners ExxonMobil Foundation and Nigeria’s Enterprise Development Centre. The app forms the first part of the blended learning Road to Growth Nigeria programme, which is currently in its third consecutive iteration.
This work forms part of the Foundation’s 100,000 Women Campaign, which set out in early 2020 to support another 100,000 women across the world by the end of 2022. In order to do this, Cherie Blair is convening the Global Campaign Board of visionary leaders and philanthropists to help raise funds and garner support for the Campaign. It is this Board which Fade Ogunro now joins as the first African member, sharing her experience and expertise to further the Foundation’s important work.
With a background in Journalism, Creative Writing and Spanish from Roehampton University, Fade’s sojourn into the industry started in the UK where she worked for Google. Upon her return to Nigeria, in 2010, she worked for The Beat 99.9 FM radio station and a year later, she co-founded Film Factory Productions and Executive Produced TV adverts and documentaries for multinationals such as General Electric, Coco-Cola, Microsoft, Lancome and MTN.
Fade Ogunro is an ambitious techpreneur and innovative problem solver, with goals to impact Africa by increasing digital gig-work and self-sustainable employment. In 2019 she launched her latest venture BookingsAfrica.com, a pan-African on-demand digital marketplace that allows professionals and service providers from Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa to sell their services and skills online. The platform currently has more than 85,000 users, among which 60% are women.
Fade said: “I’m delighted to join the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women’s Global Campaign Board, helping them to raise much-needed funds and awareness across West Africa. It’s my dream to build great leaders, drive gender equality and reduce the rate of unemployment across Africa. I believe this can be rapidly achieved through digital adoption and inclusion; where learning, training, delivering a service and making money is done digitally. Sub-Saharan African economies lose nearly $100 billion a year because of the gender gap in the labour market and side by side with the Foundation, I am looking forward to contributing to minimizing that loss.”
