PU
Pearl Uzokwe
Director of Governance and Sustainability
Sahara Group
Presentation
Pearl is a qualified solicitor and member of the Law Society of England & Wales. She graduated with an LLB (Hons.) from the University of Bristol and is also a Chartered Secretary (ICSA). She has since experienced a remarkable professional growth in the last fifteen years whilst building her legal career within UK and Nigerian corporate structures.
In 2002, she began working at the Crown Agents UK who provide specialist and multidisciplinary services in institutional development, international trade & procurement and finance. Her role in the legal department of the organization, saw her provide legal advice and support to the UK Department for International Development (DFID) in the development and administration of a number of notable funds including the Private Infrastructure Development Group – set up to facilitate private investment in the infrastructure needed to help alleviate poverty in developing countries and the International Finance Facility for Immunisation (IFFIM) – a $4 billion investment facility designed to accelerate the availability of funds to be used for health and immunisation programs in 70 of the world’s poorest countries.
She built a strong working relationship with the donors which included country donors like the UK, French and South African governments and private NGOs like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. These two funds in addition to her work on the Emerging African Infrastructure Fund (EAIF) influenced her decision to seek employment primarily with organizations who combined their corporate pursuits with a clear and effective social purpose.
After a period with City of London firms Denton Wilde, Sapte LLP and Stephenson Harwood LLP working within their corporate departments, she relocated to Lagos, Nigeria in 2009 and joined the Legal team at Sahara Group as the third member of the then budding department. She threw herself enthusiastically into the team work that was necessary to grow and nurture the unit’s human capital and widen the remit of its function to the international energy group as it spread inexorably across the energy value chain in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East.
Pearl’s vast professional experience within the upstream, downstream and midstream sectors of the oil and gas industry, corporate law and international development culminated in her appointment as the Group’s Director for Governance and Sustainability - a role which her professional pursuits and private passions seemed to have been leading up to in the period before hand.
She is married with a daughter.
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