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. The foundation creates opportunities for 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.

The Foundation has 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 program, which is currently in its third consecutive iteration. Nigeria is a Key Market for the foundation.

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 that Fade Ogunro now joins as the first African member, sharing her experience and expertise to further the Foundation’s important work.

In her words: “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 labor market and side by side with the Foundation, I am looking forward to contributing to minimizing that loss.”

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.