Dr Amy Jadesimi, is the managing director of the Lagos Deep Offshore Logistics Base (LADOL), a privately owned, deep-offshore logistics hub in Nigeria specialized in the production of maritime, oil and gas, and general manufacturing support services for multinational industrial and offshore enterprises.
Jadesimi started out on an unconventional career path, she received her first degree from Oxford University, where she earned a BA in Physiological Sciences and then proceeded to Oxford University Medical School, from which she graduated as a medical doctor (MD). After Oxford, she joined Goldman Sachs International in London as part of the Investment Banking Division, specializing in corporate finance and mergers and acquisitions.
Now you’d wonder why anyone with such a promising medical career would take a turn into business. Jadesimi has a convincing answer to that. She didn’t set out to become a business woman but then business chose her.
“I did not actually choose to go into business,” Jadesimi explains to Ventures Africa, “but I was fortunate enough to be offered a job by Goldman Sachs while working with a firm [a group of doctors] under a female surgeon in Oxford. She encouraged me to go on and explore it, saying that it was a good opportunity to see what an alternative career would be like, and that I could come back to the hospital in another year. This made it easy for me to go and try something new – investment banking”
And sure enough she enjoyed every bit of it and simply went with the business flow. After her third year at Goldman Sachs, the power lady left to pursue an MBA at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. While at Stanford, she accepted an internship with Brait Private Equity in Johannesburg, South Africa, working as a transaction executive in private equity. Afterwhich she returned to Nigeria to set up a financial consultancy firm before joining the Management Team of LiLe as Managing Director.
Her next move was to join her father, Oladipo Jadesimi, a former founding partner of Arthur Andersen Nigeria, at his company: the Lagos Deep Offshore Logistics Base (LADOL), the only Nigerian owned deep offshore logistics base and the largest privately financed logistics base in Nigeria.
She attributes her strength and clarity of purpose to her Nigerian heritage and childhood influence “My [paternal] grandfather was a bishop in the Anglican Church, while my [maternal] grandfather was Nigeria’s first Finance Minister, Festus Samuel Okotie Eboh,” she says. “I grew up with a very strong sense of pride in what it means to be Nigerian and what we can achieve as a people, which strongly contradicted the feedback I got from the world. For me, it is very important as Nigerians that we take time out to look for our personal heroes and learn about our heritage, who we actually are and what we have achieved as a people, instead of listening to the negative narrative the world gives us.”
With a strong passion for her country and brethren, Dr. Jadesimi joined Venture Strategies for Heath and Development (VSHD), an organization which works with Nigerian doctors and birth attendants to reduce Nigeria’s high maternal mortality rate. The organization has since partnered with a leading local Pharmaceutical company, Emzor, to distribute the drug throughout Nigeria.
Dr. Jadesimi believes that every woman has ample opportunity to thrive in whatever sphere she finds herself, especially in business.
“I think people more easily dismiss a woman in the workplace or try to put women down,” she says. “I have found that you have to set your mind to be 100-percent professional at all times. You must know what you are talking about before you open your mouth and do your work in such a way that you leave no excuse or doubt for people to derogate you or your work because you are a woman… I think you also have to be smart about how you come across to people as a woman.”
In 2014 Dr. Amy Jadesimi was listed among the 20 Youngest Power Women In Africa by Forbes magazine and was named a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader in 2013. She was also nominated along a few other young leaders to take part in the Bishop Tutu Fellowship in 2012.
Dr Jadesimi is dedicated to her passion, driving change and creating solutions in Africa.
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