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2007 Tutu Fellow Mezuo Nwuneli's Sahel Capital team has won the Impact Investment Award given by the Impact Investors Foundation at the Blending Finance for Social Investment Conference in Nigeria. The foundation says that the award honors and recognises a leading social enterprise and an investor within the Nigerian impact investing space who have made significant impact by providing solutions through their innovations, products, services or investments.

The award recognises entities who are able to set high standards through their business activities and investment decisions which further underscores the possibility of “doing good while doing well.”

Nigeria's Business Day has written a lengthy profile on the groundbreaking work that 2007 Tutu Fellow Mezuo Nwuneli has done in financing and agribusiness.  It tracks how his company, Sahel Capital, started in agribusiness by backing a startup after discovering that a local noodle company was importing 50 tons of chili pepper a month. 

Mezuo and his wife, who ran the company, believed that chili could be sourced in Nigeria and set out to facilitate import substitution. This was a change from their initial business plan, which was to produce jams, spreads, spices, and seasonings.

The Governor of Kaduna State in Nigeria, Mallam Nasir el-Rufai, has appointed 2011 Tutu Fellow Muhammad Sani Dattijo as his new Chief of Staff. Previously, he served as the Commissioner of Planning and Budget and was also the Director of Strategy for the Governor’s 2019 re-election campaign. In 2015, he joined the Kaduna State Excecutive Council as its youngest member. 

As budget czar, he was acknowledged as a champion of reform and was instrumental in moving Kaduna state to commence the implementation of  the Open Governance Partnership and presenting and delivering budgets ahead of time to the state legislature.

By day, 2015 Tutu Fellow Wiebe Boer is an impact investor who works with partners to increase access to commercial energy products and services.  By night - or in his spare time - he is a Nigerian football historian. 

Dr Wiebe Boer's latest work on Nigerian football, a book titled The History of Football In Nigeria - A story of Heroes and Epics, is to launch in Lagos on 10 June 2018.  It's been favorably reviewed by no less than Aliko Dangote, the President and CEO of the Dangote Group. 

Bella Naija, a leading online site, has featured 2015 Tutu Fellow Deji Adewunmi and his two co-founders for their employment portal, called Jobberman.  The company has been listed at number eight by Forbes in tech start-ups in Africa.   Jobberman is Nigeria's largest job website and quite possibly the largest site of its kind in West Africa.  Deji, along with Opeyemi Awoyemi and Olalekan Olude, met at university as undergraduates and became friends, going on to launch the business together.  The site has more than two million job applicants and carries jobs from more than 40 thousand employers. 

Students who attended the Visiola Foundation's 2016 STEM Summer Camp for teenage girls impressed U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and American ambassadors when they visited Abuja, Nigeria. One of the projects the girls had was to make a robotic forklift (see video below). The Visiola Foundation was founded by 2014 Tutu Fellow Lade Araba.  It educates high-potential girls and young women in the STEM (Science, Tech, Engineering & Math) fields to build a pipeline of leaders and innovators who will help to transform African countries.

BBC News is carrying a series of letters from African journalists and recently carried a piece by novelist and writer Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani on Boko Haram's Islamist insurgency. Nwaubani, an AFLI Leadership for Change Fellow, travelled to the Nigerian town of  Michika and found it split on grounds of ethnic and religious lines.

The following essay was submitted by Tutu Fellow Uzodinma Iweala as a thought piece for the 2015 Tutu Leadership Programme and garnered a second place.  In it, he asks what it is to be a Nigerian and what are the common threads, the common narratives - myths, if you wish - that all Nigerians need  to create and sustain a common nationality.

Tutu Fellow Jumoke Oduwole has been appointed as a senior economic development advisor in the Nigerian government.  She is the Senior Special Assistant to the President on Industry, Trade and Investment in the Office of the Vice President.  The President has given the Vice President the authority to take a supervisory role on developing the Nigerian economy.  Oduwole will also be assisting the Minister for Industry, Trade and Investment, who is new to international trade, although he has a background in private equity.

The U.S. Supreme Court has recently ruled that gays in the U.S. have the same legal rights in marriage as heterosexuals; in Nigeria, homosexuality is legally prohibited.  With Nigeria's new President Muhammadu Buhari and U.S. President Barack Obama to meet this month (July 2015), newspapers in Nigeria are speculating whether gay rights will be on the summit agenda. Tutu Fellow Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani has penned a piece for CNN's African Voices on resistance in Nigeria and other African countries to equal rights for all as it pertains to gays.  It is titled: Why are Nigerians terrified of same-sex marriage in America?