The Bold Woman Awards by French champagne brand, Veuve Clicquot, returns to Nigeria for its fourth run. The prestigious award, launched in 1972, rewards and celebrates daring women entrepreneurs across the globe who impact their business sector and embody the visionary leadership and audacious spirit of Madame Clicquot, the brand’s pioneering female leader.
This year’s finalists are women whose ventures began as answers to a personal need and then scaled into solutions that others could depend on. Their boldness is seasoned: tested in public, refined under pressure, and generous enough now to serve as a road map for those coming after them.
Ifeoma Uddoh – Shecluded
Ifeoma Uddoh founded Shecluded, a financial company that provides women with access to credit, financial education, business advisory and wealth management, after discovering a disturbing fact: women account for 55% of the entrepreneurs running the MSMEs sector in Nigeria, but they were not getting funded.
Armed with experience in business consulting at PWC, she put her problem-solving skills to the test. “Putting money in women’s hands changes everything,” she told Guardian Woman. Shecluded has earned the trust of hundreds of women with a community-driven approach and by genuinely caring. This empathetic approach to business allows her to see potential in small businesses that others might dismiss. She said it furnished her with insights no spreadsheets could provide.
This is also evident in her relational leadership style. “It’s not just about KPIs and outcomes, it’s about nurturing potential the way you nurture a seed,” she said.
Uddoh advocates for a radical redesign of the financial system, specifically for women. The first thing that needs to be thrown out the window is the obsession with collateral, which she proposes be replaced with cashflow-based lending and trust-driven models. Her boldness comes from an inner conviction that one’s footprint, no matter how small, can change the world.
Remi Martins-Johnson – Texture Science Labs
Remi Martins-Johnson’s path to entrepreneurship grew out of both passion and frustration, a deep love for hair, and the challenge of finding extensions that blended seamlessly with her natural texture. What began as a blog to validate her concerns grew into a business, Natural Girl Wigs, which later became Regirl, a brand focused on lab-made hair products, and also led to the founding of Texture Science Labs, Nigeria’s first dedicated hair laboratory.
Her story highlights how personal frustration can be a powerful catalyst for pioneering solutions and redefining what’s possible. As her customers are primarily women, she noted that because she “lives the same frustrations and shares the same needs,” it is easier to design solutions that speak directly to them.
Martins-Johnson faced scepticism when introducing lab-made hair, with people questioning its necessity or dismissing it as “just synthetic hair”. However, as things unfolded, particularly with the community championing the product, sceptics became customers. This experience underscores her definition of boldness: acting on conviction sometimes even before the world catches up. It is the courage to build what you wish existed, even when others cannot yet see the vision. Womanhood has taught her that leadership is not about control, it’s about care. She believes that the way women nurture, listen, and build community is a powerful form of leadership.
Yetunde Ayo Oyalowo – Market Doctors
While ‘the market’ is often tossed around in business circles as an abstract concept, Yetunde Ayo Oyalowo is taking healthcare delivery quite literally to the marketplace through her initiative, Market Doctors, a social impact enterprise that provides affordable and accessible basic healthcare to Nigerians, especially those in challenging, underserved communities.
“Healthcare doesn’t need marble floors, air-conditioning, white coats; it needs proximity, empathy, and the courage to show up,” Oyalowo said. And show up she did. Her team of health workers would go from stall to stall in the market or house to house in a community. Or set up shop in a mobile clinic. Since its launch in 2018, Market Doctors has employed over 200 doctors who have delivered care to hundreds of thousands of patients.
Oyalowo operates a leadership style that prioritises empathy and human connection. Her workers are trained to treat people with dignity and empathy, and to listen before prescribing. The guiding principle is to “treat the illness, but also see the person as a whole.” For Oyalowo, being a woman provided a distinct advantage: she observed that market women easily opened up to her about not just health, but also financial and marital struggles, often telling her, “You understand us.”
Michelle Aduro – Aduro Farms
How do you convince young people that agriculture can be a modern, cutting-edge career, unlike the old ‘hoe and cutlass’ stereotype? Tell them about Michelle Aduro, a woman in her mid-20s, who is building Aduro Farms into a modern agribusiness that runs on renewable energy, data-driven systems, and value addition.
Aduro Farms produces poultry, pigs, and snails, and processes farm products like cassava, palm oil, and plantain. The farm actively implements renewable energy solutions, with water pumps, the hostel, and animal pens powered by solar systems. This approach reduces costs, cuts their carbon footprint, and ensures sustainable operation. Aduro defines sustainability as achieving balance: feeding the current generation without depriving future ones, building systems that regenerate soil, respect animals, empower people, and remain profitable.
Aduro believes farming extends beyond crops and livestock. She sees agriculture as a means of nurturing lives, creating opportunities, and building something larger than oneself. Her favourite thing to grow is people and community. If the farm could speak, Aduro believes it would say, “Here, people come first.” This also informs her leadership style, which she says isn’t about control, “it’s about care”. Aduro says leadership is carrying both the vision and the people simultaneously. She believes that leading with heart is a lesson that womanhood imparts.
For Aduro, boldness is not just about taking big steps; it’s about taking consistent, deliberate ones even when the path isn’t clear.
Simi Williams – Beyond Fitness
Simi Williams’ journey from investment banking, private equity to wellness entrepreneurship, while navigating illness and motherhood, exemplifies going “beyond perceived limitations”. In 2019, she founded BEYOND fitness, Africa’s first boutique fitness studio and digital platform, offering indoor cycling, strength training, barre pilates and stretch and mobility sessions.
Williams envisions the future of fitness in Africa shifting from aesthetics to prevention, longevity, and performance. This will include mind-body integration across mobility, sleep, nutrition, and mental stamina, alongside strength and cardio. Access will be omnichannel, combining premium studios with digital coaching and community. BEYOND is preparing for this by professionalising talent through its Academy, embedding prevention-first practices, and blending premium studio experiences with digital access. The goal is for wellness to become part of Africa’s leadership story, where science meets culture.
Motherhood taught Simi Williams adaptability, a crucial lesson for someone who loves structure and planning. Building BEYOND with a six-month-old during a pandemic taught her to reset quickly, lead with grace, and embrace uncertainty. This shaped her leadership, shifting her measure of success from rigid plan execution to resilient adaptation. She likens building a business to raising a child, requiring vision, patience, and faith.
“I knew firsthand the pressure women face to balance ambition with family, the silent toll of stress on our health. That perspective is why BEYOND looks and feels the way it does: human-centred and a sanctuary from the external chaos,” she said. For Williams, being bold means choosing conviction over comfort. It involves daring to create what doesn’t exist, finding courage to build against the odds, and making difficult choices
Teniola Tunde-Oni – Pharmarun
What began as a personal effort to help neighbours get essential medicines during the lockdowns soon revealed a deeper crisis in Nigeria’s healthcare system. As requests flooded in, Teniola Tunde-Oni saw firsthand how fragmented access to medication left many patients stranded. The pandemic amplified a problem she had long noticed as a community pharmacist: pharmacies in crowded areas ran out of stock while others had surplus, and patients were caught in between. “That imbalance showed the scale of the issue and inspired me to build a sustainable solution,” Tunde-Oni said.
In 2022, she launched Pharmarun to bridge those gaps and ensure people could count on timely, reliable access to the medicines they need. Tunde-Oni is clear about where her passion lies: not just in medicines, but in “the systems that deliver them.”
Her background prepared her for this. A pharmacist by training, she had worked within regulatory bodies like NAFDAC and across hospital operations, giving her a unique view of the bottlenecks in medicine distribution. Pharmarun grew out of that knowledge, connecting over 1,000 pharmacies and helping patients receive quality medicines faster and more reliably. She envisions Pharmarun becoming the “backbone of medicine distribution across the continent” in the next decade.
For Teniola, boldness means “daring to do it all,” embracing her multiple identities as a woman, wife, mum, and CEO as a “superpower.” And womanhood, particularly from watching women around her, taught her that leadership is rooted in “nurturing and building others up,” and that it doesn’t have to be a lonely journey but can be done alongside others, leveraging “community” and “sisterhood.” Building Pharmarun with her best friend (Funmilola) reinforced that collaboration, trust, and a shared vision are powerful forms of leadership.
Funmilola Aderemi – Pharmarun
With nearly a decade in tech, Funmilola Aderemi approaches healthcare not just as a service but as a product design challenge. As Co-founder and Product Manager of Pharmarun, she focuses on making access to medicine seamless, empathetic, and user-friendly. For her, building healthcare tools isn’t just about functionality; it’s about understanding the patient journey, anticipating pain points, and designing systems that reduce friction at every step.
Funmilola firmly believes that “healthcare urgently needs to design for empathy”. For her, products must go beyond mere functionality to “deeply understand the patient journey, anticipate challenges, and reduce friction”. Every element, from taps to workflows, should reflect the real-life experiences of both patients and practitioners, not just assumptions. She was the architect behind key Pharmarun features, including its subscription service that allows patients with chronic conditions to schedule recurring deliveries, lock in prices, and receive reminders. She sees it as transformative: solving problems patients “didn’t even know they had.”
Her leadership style blends her tech expertise with empathy. She stresses that the most overlooked element in digital health is the “real-life user,” and she designs with simplicity as her north star, ensuring even the least tech-savvy patient can access life-saving medicines.
For Funmilola, boldness is stepping outside her comfort zone and taking risks that challenge entrenched systems. As a woman, she has faced subtle biases, questions about childcare or suggestions that she needed a male co-founder, but those only fueled her determination. This “fueled me to show that success isn’t determined by sex”. She realised being a woman offers a unique “lens of empathy, resilience, and creativity in solving problems”.
The journeys of this year’s Bold Woman and Bold Future Awards finalists show that boldness is not a single act but a way of approaching the world: asking different questions, refusing to accept broken systems, and insisting that solutions must serve people with empathy as well as efficiency. Whether it is reimagining finance for women, transforming beauty through science, bringing healthcare to underserved markets, modernising agriculture, reframing fitness, or reengineering access to medicines, each finalist has built from deeply personal experiences into ventures with wide public impact.
As the Bold Woman Awards by Veuve Clicquot enters its fourth year in Nigeria, these women remind us that leadership today is about vision anchored in lived reality. They embody Madame Clicquot’s audacity not only by daring to build but by creating blueprints that others can follow. Their stories are an invitation to the next generation to see possibilities where others see limits, and to carry boldness forward as both legacy and responsibility.
