Speaker Bio

Tolulope Babajide is a driven development professional with experience in gender inclusion, financial inclusion, women’s economic empowerment, agricultural livelihoods, and strategic partnerships.

Tolulope is the Gender Network Manager at Financial Sector Deepening Africa, Nairobi. She primarily works on the Gender Collaborative Programme, working across all the Financial Sector Deepening Organisations (Kenya, Rwanda, Southern Africa, Mozambique, Zambia, Nigeria, Tanzania, Ethiopia and Zambia) to ensure that women have increased access and usage of financial services and products. Within FSD Africa, she works across pillars (Digital Economy, Capital Markets, Risk and Resilience) for gender mainstreaming in programming.

She has worked at Sahel Consulting Agriculture and Nutrition Ltd, Nigeria as the Financial Inclusion and Gender Manager, where she led the financial inclusion component of the Advancing Local Dairy Development in Nigeria (ALDDN) program, which focuses on developing context-specific innovative financial products and services to improve the livelihoods of female dairy farmers in five Northern states.

She previously served as the Partnerships and Innovations Advisor for the World Bank-funded Nigeria for Women Project ( $100 million) where she led on both international and national partnerships while also developed the financial inclusion strategy.

Tolulope is skilled at public speaking and writing on topical issues such as gender and development, women’s economic empowerment, and forming strategic partnerships to achieve impact. She has spoken both nationally, regionally and globally on women’s financial inclusion, women’s economic empowerment and agricultural livelihoods. She is a guest columnist at Business Day and Inclusion Times.

She holds a bachelor’s degree in English and Literary Studies from Ekiti State University and an MBA from Nexford University. She has attended multiple professional courses on gender, financial inclusion and digital economy in prominent institutions such as Lagos Business School, Digital Frontiers Institute, World Bank Academy, Stockholm Environment Institute and International Monetary Fund.

Tolulope volunteers as a mentor to young women in development and is a Philanthropy Circuit Executive Committee member. She also serves as the Board Chair of ‘A Girl Project.’