Soohemba Aker does not wait for systems to make room. She builds the room herself. As the founder of NOBUL Africa Foundation, she works at the intersection of leadership, innovation, and civic participation, ensuring that young people, and particularly women from excluded communities, are not just present in decision-making spaces but are actively shaping them.
Beyond Visibility: Access as a Feminist Question
For Soohemba, the question has never been simply about who is visible. It is about who holds the pen. Who drafts the policy. Who sits in the room when budgets are decided, when timelines are drawn, when the future of a community is written in language that most of its members will never see.
She is clear-eyed about a reality that many institutions prefer to leave unspoken: talent is universal, but access is deeply political. The women she works with are not lacking in capacity. They are lacking in doorways. Her work is about building those doorways and making sure they stay open long after she has walked through them herself.
When Systems Exclude, Silence Is Structural
Soohemba's path toward this work was not accidental. It was shaped by years of watching capable, brilliant people remain invisible, not because they lacked ideas or effort, but because the systems around them were never designed to hear them.
In Nigeria, the #EndSARS protests became a defining moment for a generation. Young people took to the streets not simply to express anger but to demand accountability from systems that had long treated them as subjects rather than participants. For Soohemba, that period crystallised something she had felt for a long time: outrage alone does not shift power. What shifts power is structure.
She moved away from the language of awareness toward the practice of architecture. Not just calling for women to be included, but building the systems they could enter, influence, and ultimately transform.
When you grow up watching women who are more than qualified get passed over, you stop asking for permission and start building the table yourself.
From Tokenism to Decision-Making
One of the clearest threads in Soohemba's work is her refusal to settle for the appearance of progress. She draws a sharp distinction between representation and power. Women are often invited to participate, placed on panels, featured in photographs, listed on advisory boards. But participation without authority is decoration.
Her focus is on moving women beyond the margins of representation into positions where they shape policy, allocate resources, and determine outcomes. Through NOBUL Africa Foundation, she creates pathways that prepare young women not just to attend meetings but to lead them, not to respond to agendas but to set them.
Women as architects of systems, not beneficiaries of them. That distinction matters. It is the difference between being consulted and being consequential.
Leading as a Young Woman
Leading in spaces that were not designed for young women requires a particular kind of endurance. Soohemba has navigated law, development, and policy, and in each of those arenas, she has encountered the same quiet pressure: to shrink, to wait longer than necessary, to soften the edges of her ambition so that others feel more comfortable.
She has chosen not to comply. Not out of defiance for its own sake, but because she recognises that occupying space is itself a political act. Every time a young woman leads with clarity and purpose, she makes it slightly easier for the one who comes after her.
What sustains the work, she says, is not applause. It is clarity of purpose. Knowing exactly why you are in the room and refusing to forget it, even when the room would prefer you did.
Leadership does not require permission. Lived experience is expertise, and readiness is built through participation, not waiting.
Structural Barriers Demand Structural Change
In Nigeria and across much of the continent, the barriers women face are not personal failings. They are systemic. Cultural norms that confine ambition to the domestic sphere. Institutional practices that treat women's leadership as exceptional rather than expected. Access to education, technology, and capital that remains staggeringly uneven.
Soohemba is careful not to romanticise resilience. She understands that asking women to overcome structural exclusion through individual effort is itself a form of injustice. What is needed is structural change: policies that are enforced, budgets that reflect priorities, institutions that are held to account.
The gap between policy commitment and practice remains wide. Governments sign declarations. Organisations publish frameworks. But the women on the ground, the ones doing the work in communities that rarely make headlines, continue to face the same barriers. That gap is where Soohemba focuses her energy.
What Accountability Looks Like
When asked what meaningful change requires, Soohemba is specific. She does not speak in vague aspirations. She names three urgent shifts:
Stop concentrating resources, training, and visibility in capital cities and elite institutions. The women doing the most urgent work are often the furthest from the centres of power. Reach them where they are.
Not as beneficiaries of someone else's strategy, but as the strategists themselves. Fund their organisations. Amplify their voices. And then step back.
Inclusion must be a measurable outcome, not a line in a mission statement. Track it. Report on it. And when it falls short, ask why.
Redefining Legacy
Soohemba does not measure her impact in the currency of programs delivered or titles held. Her definition of legacy is more demanding than that. What matters, she says, is whether more women from overlooked communities are shaping policy. Whether more young women are building solutions to the problems they understand most intimately. Whether the next generation of leaders can step into rooms without having to explain why they belong.
That is the work. Not a single campaign or initiative, but a slow, deliberate rewriting of who gets to lead, and on whose terms.
She is not asking for a seat at the table. She is building a new one.