Olufunke Baruwa is a gender and development practitioner with over two decades of experience from government and civil society focusing on public policy, gender advocacy, civil society strengthening and governance. She has led several social policies and reforms in Nigeria and has served at various times as Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian Women's Trust Fund, a technical and financial resource for women in governance in Nigeria and currently serves as the Chair of the Board; Program Officer at the defunct Petroleum (Special) Trust Fund and National Poverty Eradication Program (NAPEP); Gender Advisor at the Office of the Senior Special Assistant to the President on MDGs; and as a Technical Assistant Research, Policy & Planning in the Ministry of Communication Technology.
Olufunke is currently the Regional Program Officer for Gender, Racial and Ethnic Justice at the Ford Foundation Office for West Africa where she leads work on ending gender-based violence particularly against women and girls.
Prior to joining Ford, she was the Civil Society and Media Specialist in the Peace & Democratic Governance Office of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in Nigeria where she designed and led multi-million-dollar civil society strengthening projects. As one of ‘17 women changing the world’ identified by the Institute for Inclusive Security at its 2015 Colloquium held at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she is a member of the Women Waging Peace Network: a Leading Woman, public speaker and mentor.
She holds a B.Sc. Business Administration and an MBA in Management from the Universities of Abuja and Nigeria, Nsukka with post-graduate certifications in Gender from the University of East Anglia and Public Policy & Management from the University of York as a 2011 Commonwealth Scholar. She also holds an MA in Corruption & Governance from the University of Sussex.
