There, a stranger stepped in, whispering, almost to himself, “Bismillah.” Without thinking, she answered, “Bismillah,” too, their first connection in a foreign land. When they got out of the elevator, they realised they were both headed to the airport. The man was still trying to find a ride.

Uyanna, who was in a hurry to catch her flight, offered to share her Uber with him. In the car, they fell into an easy conversation, switching between Arabic and English; the stranger and the Uber driver were surprised that she could speak Arabic. Uyanna recalls this specific camaraderie fondly.

It is a snapshot of how she moves through the world: switching languages, sectors, and continents like she switches tabs on a laptop. She works as the Chief of Staff at Schneider Electric, the global energy firm, yet her life and work history read like the itinerary of a perpetual commuter between worlds: oil and gas, global policy, media, fintech, crypto, and energy; Nigeria, the United States, the Middle East, Europe, and Southeast Asia. “The vision is [to be] a global expert,” she told me.

But that vision started far from Paris. This is the life of Uyanna, a globe-trotter. Get The Best African Tech Newsletters In Your Inbox Select your country Nigeria Ghana Kenya South Africa Egypt Morocco Tunisia Algeria Libya Sudan Ethiopia Somalia Djibouti Eritrea Uganda Tanzania Rwanda Burundi Democratic Republic of the Congo Republic of the Congo Central African Republic Chad Cameroon Gabon Equatorial Guinea São Tomé and Príncipe Angola Zambia Zimbabwe Botswana Namibia Lesotho Eswatini Mozambique Madagascar Mauritius Seychelles Comoros Cape Verde Guinea-Bissau Senegal The Gambia Guinea Sierra Leone Liberia Côte d'Ivoire Burkina Faso Mali Niger Benin Togo Other Select your gender Male Female Others TC Daily TC Events Next wave Entering Tech Subscribe The scholarship child who wanted to run Chevron Uyanna grew up in Lagos, where she finished primary school before winning a scholarship to Nigerian Turkish International College (NTIC) in Abuja for high school.

She went on to Louisiana Tech University in Ruston, Louisiana, United States, to study Chemical Engineering & French. At a young age, she wanted to be the Managing Director of a global oil company, and for a while, she was on course to achieve that goal. In the summer of 2015, she landed an internship at the Nigerian subsidiary of ExxonMobil, the multinational oil and gas firm.

It came with the prestige she had dreamt about as a kid: the exposure, the above-average stipends, and other little privileges she earned from working in a Fortune 500 company. During her internship, she visited the Qua Iboe Terminal, a crude oil export facility in Akwa Ibom State, southern Nigeria. It felt like a dream assignment on paper: a front-row seat to the industry she’d always wanted to lead.

But the reality was different. She watched as crude oil spills stained the waterways that the local communities depended on. She watched people cough in the air they were supposed to breathe, and she saw crops die in ways that felt anything but natural.

The work she had romanticised, she realised, was not as she had thought. It was rather an occupational hazard for the people living in a resource-rich region that did not feel rich at all. Her quasi-honeymoon ended after that experience.

In its place, a single, stubborn question took root: why wasn’t a multinational company held to the same environmental standards in Nigeria as it was abroad? The answers she found were not enough. She went looking for better tools.

After her graduation in 2016, Uyanna felt her Chemical Engineering background was no longer enough. To change the rules, she realised, she had to sit in rooms where the rules were written. She enrolled for a master’s in global policy at The Lyndon B.

Johnson School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin, in the US, focusing on development, innovation, and economics. In March 2016, during a summer break, she joined Sustainability International, a nonprofit working to clean up the Niger Delta region. But philanthropy has its own bottleneck: donors were far removed from the affected region, she realised.

“I said to my boss [at Sustainability International], ‘let’s make a virtual reality documentary, so that way, we’ll be able to bridge the empathy gap,’” said Uyanna. “And even if people haven’t heard of where we are talking about, once they wear those headsets, we’ll take them there.” Al Jazeera had just launched its Virtual Reality (VR) unit, Contrast VR, in 2017. Uyanna pitched the global media company a VR documentary that would visually pull people into the creeks