Beyond the Scholarship: Meet the 2026 Aig-Imoukhuede Scholar

Before becoming our 2026 Aig-Imoukhuede Scholar, Joy Ugonma Olayiwola had already spent years asking a simple question: how can we make the systems we work in work better? It is a question that has taken her to unexpected places. 

Joy is an alumna of the Aig-Imoukhuede Public Leaders Programme (PLP), Cohort 5, and has spent more than 17 years in public service at the National Space Research and Development Agency (NASRDA). Today, she serves as Assistant Director and Head of the Smart Geospatial & ICT Unit at GeoApps Plus Limited, a NASRDA subsidiary, where technology is part of her everyday work, from digital systems and infrastructure to the tools that help people and institutions do their jobs more effectively. 

In 2021, she became the first Nigerian woman to discover an asteroid through the International Astronomical Search Collaboration. A few years later, she helped bring space a little closer to home by coordinating Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) Contact Nigeria 2025, connecting Nigerian students with astronauts aboard the International Space Station. 

An asteroid discovery and a conversation with astronauts might seem like the most remarkable parts of the story. Yet they sit alongside another, quieter part of Joy’s career: the persistent work of improving the systems around her. That has meant looking at how technology can support institutions, how processes can work better, and how innovation can move beyond being a good idea to becoming something practical, sustainable and useful. It is the kind of work that rarely makes headlines, but it is often where institutional change begins. 

During the Aig-Imoukhuede Public Leaders Programme, that instinct became a practical project. For her reform project, a prerequisite for completing the  programme, Joy worked on developing a Digital Professional Growth Hub for GeoApps Plus Limited, designed to strengthen staff motivation, capacity and accountability. The project brought together behavioural leadership and technology, beginning with efforts to rebuild trust and shared responsibility and moving towards a digital platform that could support staff onboarding, learning and professional growth. 

It was a fitting project for someone who had spent much of her career thinking about how people, technology and institutions can work better together. The idea was practical: combine leadership and technology to address challenges around staff engagement, professional development and accountability. Her project is a useful glimpse into how Joy approaches institutional problems: start with people, bring technology in where it adds value, and build something that can become part of how an organisation works. 

Now, that interest is taking her into a new field of study, as the 2026 Aig-Imoukhuede MPP Scholar. Joy will begin a Master of Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. After years of working within public institutions and using technology to solve practical problems, she will now have the opportunity to examine the larger policy systems in which those problems exist. 

The aim is not to leave behind the work she has already done, but to see it from a wider vantage point to better understand the relationship between policy, institutions, economics and the people responsible for turning decisions into results. For someone whose career has moved between science, technology and public service, this next step feels less like a change of direction than a widening of the lens. 

Joy has spent years looking at individual systems and asking how they can work better. Now, she gets to look at the bigger system around them. And perhaps that brings us back to the question that has quietly followed her career all along: how do we make the systems we work in work better?