Innovation and Excellence Awards
This year’s Africa Tech Festival Awards, held on 13 November, highlighted the pioneering work transforming lives and industries across Africa, inspiring future innovation and growth. It demonstrated excellence and commitment to pushing the boundaries of technology in Africa and companies, individuals, and projects.
It is a celebration of Africa’s community of techno champions, the largest tech and digital connectivity conference and exhibition in Africa. It brings together hundreds of exhibitors, more than 450 speakers and more than 15000 delegates.
Among this year’s award winners was Female Innovator of the Year: Toyosi Odukoya of the Mastercard Foundation
Toyosi is a highly experienced strategy, innovation, analytics and digital transformation business leader. Her expertise lies in in applying insights and analytics, ensuring an organisation’s competitive advantage and vision are fully harnessed for growth and impact. She leads multicultural teams across global borders, not only in Africa, but also Asia and North America. Her vast experience includes implementing data and analytics capabilities across various sectors and industries such as telecommunications, FMCG and development sectors.
Toyosi successfully led the strategic implementation and adoption of MTN Telecommunications Ltd, Nigeria’s big data project and many advanced analytical models for specific business use cases, to drive smarter business insights and decisions.
She also built and led the digital transformation capabilities for Coca-Cola, covering 33 countries in the West, Central and Islands of Africa, formulating and executing digital frameworks focused on customers and consumers, underpinned by strong analytics, to drive consistent growth for the organisation.
Currently, she leads the Programme Planning; Operations & Business Intelligence functions at Mastercard Foundation and drives an integrated programme-wide performance management, monitoring, tracking, reporting, analytics, programme planning, quality assurance process efficiencies and digitisation. She is also a highly sought-after speaker and has spoken at various analytics and leadership conferences across Africa, the Middle East and Europe.
Toyosi currently serves as a Board Member with WAAW (Working to Advance Science and Technology Education for African Women) Foundation, is passionate about women and children, maximising their potential.
According to Business Day, Toyosi, as first ever Head of Business Intelligence at Mastercard Foundation, designed and led the execution of data strategy. In this former position, she oversaw the development and operationalisation of the Foundation’s data strategy, governance, reporting infrastructure (including self-serve capabilities) and data analytics capabilities. She also partnered with key stakeholders to respond to established and emerging business needs and accelerate the organisation’s data literacy.
As former Director, Strategic Planning / Digital Transformation (West & Central Africa) for The Coca-Cola Company, she defined the data and digital strategy across 33 countries in the Coca-Cola West Africa Business Unit. She led key digital transformation initiatives around innovation, eCommerce, digital marketing, internal digitisation, digital capabilities and big data to enhance Coca-Cola’s growth and harness its competitive advantage. She also led key strategic initiatives focused on delivering winning metrics.
While at MTN Nigeria, she was senior manager, Business Intelligence and Geomarketting, leading big data strategic implementation and advanced analytics initiatives to drive real-time business insights for improved decision making. Odukoya is an official member of the Forbes Technological Council, where she is sharing insights on data and analytics.
