• Thursday, March 28, 2024
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‘We can’t just have one huge monolith of the national grid’- Ufere-Awoonor

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Adaku Ufere-Awoonor is an international Energy professional with over a decades’ global experience of legal and business advisory in the oil & gas, power, mining and extractive industries, leading multicultural and multilingual teams across Africa and with a strong professional network.

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She is the CEO of DAX Consult, a consulting firm with offices in Nigeria, Ghana and Liberia, which provides legal and business advisory services to local and foreign companies.

Adaku has extensive experience advising ministries, governments, IOCS and NOCS globally. Her expertise includes PSC/PSA negotiations, negotiating farmins with major IOCS, legal framework and contract assessments, facilitating legal and fiscal frameworks for major billion-dollar energy projects in Africa, creating and assisting in the implementation of contract management systems for government regulators and cross-border negotiations between sovereign governments.

Adaku has an LL.B from the University of Nigeria, a BL from the Nigerian Law School, an LLM in Oil and Gas from the University of Aberdeen, and a Certification in Public Management from the University of California, Davis.

She is a member of the Nigerian Bar Association, the International Bar Association, the Association of International Petroleum Negotiators, the Women in African Power, the Institute for Energy Security and the Young Women in Energy Association. She is also a certified Chartered Arbitrator and a Member of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators.

Adaku is a respected international conference speaker and panellist, having spoken at conferences in Equatorial Guinea, South Sudan, South Africa, the United States of America, United Kingdom, the Republic of Congo, Uganda, Ghana and Nigeria; and a prolific writer, with published articles in the field of energy and project finance.

She is a recipient of numerous honours which include the 40 Under 40 Leading Lawyers in Nigeria in 2016, Attorney of the Year at the African Legal Awards in 2017, Young African Professional of the Year by the Independent Pan-african Youth Parliament in 2018, a Fellow of the Institute of Energy Security, Ghana and a Mandela Washington Fellow 2018.

She is passionate about and lends her time to causes promoting girls’ education, gender equality, women empowerment, the advancement of women in leadership positions and the elimination of gender based violence.

Around 2010, Nigeria got a new Minister for Petroleum Resources and it was a woman. It was the first woman to ever be Minister of Petroleum, and it blew Adaku’s mind. Following that, she quit her job and went and got a Masters in Oil and Gas Law at the University of Aberdeen, and that’s basically how her Oil and Gas journey started.

After that, she started to get more interested in energy access. She read an article in Medium, by two ladies who work with Power Africa, called ‘Exploring the Relationship Between Energy and Gender Based Violence’. She had never connected the two before. According to her, “Women bear the greatest burden of energy poverty. If there’s no electricity or water in the home, it’s the woman that goes out to fetch the firewood, the woman that goes out to fetch water over long distances. There’s actually a phrase for it: ‘time poverty’ – and women suffer huge time poverty, because they’re the homemakers, they run businesses, and they also have to do all this demanding domestic work that the men don’t have to do.” She said.

For Adaku, the future of energy in Africa is smart grids – the system of many grids is the future. “We can’t just have one huge monolith of the national grid. It doesn’t work; it hasn’t worked. So smart grids, renewable energy, biogas will work. I don’t know why a lot of African countries are not taking advantage of biogas, because we have mounds of refuse everywhere that can be turned into methane and people are not just taking advantage of that” She said.