I work in the distance between what institutions provide and what rural lives receive, and I have spent my career learning to close it across Nigeria and the wider continent. My ground is agricultural extension, rural development, and the livelihoods of the people who feed Africa and reach the system last.
Development economist · Extension specialist · Translator of Africa's last mile
The world already grows enough food, and it already knows how to farm. Hunger and rural poverty survive somewhere quieter, in the last mile between what institutions produce and what actually reaches the farmer.
That distance is where food security is decided, and almost no one is trained to work inside it. I am. I have stood in the gap as an extension officer training smallholder farmers, built technology meant to cross it, evaluated the aid designed to close it, and carried what I found back into the rooms where the decisions are made, from Nigerian ministries to the institutions that finance the continent.
My doctoral research named one version of the problem. Aid can lift a country's exports while quietly raising the cost of trading, so the gains register at the institution and never reach the people who grew the goods. The pattern repeats wherever food moves. The work, every time, is to close the distance.
My specialization is agricultural extension and rural development, the work of lifting livelihoods and food security for the communities that grow the world's food and reach the system last. Economics enters because governments and development institutions hold the levers, and my doctorate lets me meet them on their own terms.
I started in the fields of Kwara State, Nigeria, training smallholder farmers through extension work. I moved through national fertilizer logistics, into agritech product development with OCP Africa and IBM, and then into a doctorate in development economics at the University of East Anglia, studying how aid travels along Nigeria's trade corridors.
I hold four degrees across agriculture, global affairs, and development economics, formed in Nigeria, the United States, and the United Kingdom, alongside PMP, PMI-ACP, AWS, and Strategic Management credentials. That range taught me to speak to the farmer and the donor in the same afternoon, in language each one trusts, and that fluency is the whole job.
From the field to the supply chain to the policy table, the same body of work seen from every vantage point.
The positions my work is built on, applied to the questions African food security is facing right now.
The center of everything I do. Extension, smallholder livelihoods, food systems, and the trade and policy that shape them, grounded in what actually happens between the harvest and the household across Nigeria and the wider continent. I work with organizations building, funding, or evaluating agricultural programs and the technologies meant to serve rural communities.
End-to-end ownership from design through delivery and honest evaluation, built for complex, multi-stakeholder environments where ambiguity is the norm and meticulous execution is the difference.
Mixed-methods research, econometric modeling, and qualitative fieldwork for institutions that need independent thinking, translated into narratives that move people to act.
Building AI-enabled tools and production pipelines for agriculture and food systems, from a digital agriculture platform shipped with IBM to AI-powered video, voice, and content workflows I design end to end. Technology made to work for the people it was meant to serve, certified through PMI's Generative AI program and AWS.
Making the hidden logic of food systems legible to the people who fund them, build them, and depend on them, through writing, policy communication, and a global public platform.
Research, writing, and public work at the intersection of food systems, rural livelihoods, and the distance between them.
A public education platform translating how the world actually feeds itself, country by country, built on an AI production pipeline I design and run end to end. Tens of thousands of views across more than twenty countries.
Watch on YouTubeNine short stories about women whose intelligence lives outside the places the world is trained to look for it, the kind of sharp mind that goes unnamed and miscounted, working quietly inside lives the systems never thought to measure.
Purchase on AmazonA translated and annotated collection of over three hundred classical Arabic aphorisms on character, knowledge, and governance, made accessible to contemporary readers.
Purchase on AmazonEssays on development, economics, and the human systems that shape how we live, written to earn the reader's time by saying something true and saying it well.
Read on MediumOn agriculture and climate-resilience work, I collaborate with Aidant Agro-Tech, a Nigerian advisory firm founded by my own professor and mentor, the teacher who first taught me agriculture. Her research spans climate-smart agriculture, pastoralism under extreme weather, water allocation, and post-harvest systems. Together we extend that expertise to farms and ranches facing climate risk, from Nigeria to the United States and beyond.
I welcome conversations on research, evaluation, advisory work, and speaking in food security, rural development, and agricultural systems. If your work lives in the space between how a system functions and the people it was built to serve, this is the conversation to start.