OUR AWARDS
Five Years of Excellence:
The Emily Aig-Imoukhuede Endowment Fund
Celebrating excellence in Nigeria’s public service since 2022
The Emily Aig-Imoukhuede Endowment Fund recognises outstanding civil servants who demonstrate professionalism, integrity, innovation, and excellence in public service delivery.
Established in 2022 by the Aig-Imoukhuede Foundation in honour of the late Pastor Emily Aig-Imoukhuede, who dedicated much of her life to public service and exemplified integrity, compassion, and selfless dedication, the Fund ensures these values continue to be celebrated and rewarded across Nigeria's civil service.
Presidential Civil Service Merit Award
Honours civil servants with at least five years of service whose careers demonstrate exceptional performance, integrity, leadership, and sustained impact in public service delivery.
Award Value: ₦500,000EPIC Award
Recognises civil servants who embody an Efficient, Productive, Incorruptible, and Citizen-Centred (EPIC) civil service — upholding Accountability, Meritocracy, Professionalism, Loyalty, and Efficiency (AMPLE).
Award Value: ₦250,000These awardees are the Foundation's mission in motion; leadership built through its programmes, excellence sealed by the Emily Aig-Imoukhuede Endowment Fund.
Joy Baderin
When Joy Baderin joined Cohort 2 of the AIG Public Leaders Programme, she was an Assistant Director at the Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs. The leadership skills she built there gave her the tools to turn good instincts into measurable results. Back at her Ministry, she helped implement a Performance Management System that pushed its 2023 performance evaluation score above 60 per cent, the highest in the Ministry's history at that point. Her reform project secured funding for an in-house project management training programme, and she went on to oversee the completion of thirteen social infrastructure projects, establish a new Project Design and Development Division, and lead the renovation of departmental offices so colleagues had a better place to work. By 2024, now a Deputy Director, she was named a recipient of the Emily Aig-Imoukhuede Memorial Award. Today, she serves as a Director in the Office of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation.
Lawrence Agbor
Lawrence Agbor's story starts with something almost ordinary: meetings that rarely began when they should. As an Assistant Director in the Ministry of Livestock Development and a participant in PLP Cohort 5, he set out to understand why, using staff surveys and stakeholder engagement to trace the problem to late arrivals, overlapping schedules, and weak accountability. His response was practical rather than dramatic — clearer meeting protocols, stronger accountability measures, and simple digital scheduling tools. It is exactly the kind of unglamorous, results-driven leadership the Award was built to find, and in 2025 it earned him the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation EPIC Award.
Okereke Paulinus Ifeanyi
Okereke Paulinus Ifeanyi's award-winning work played out on a bigger stage. As an Assistant Director in the Ministry of Information and National Orientation and an alumnus of PLP Cohort 1, he brought together the ministries and agencies responsible for Nigeria's engagement with UNESCO ahead of the 2021 General Conference in Paris, shaping one coordinated national position out of what could easily have been a fragmented set of voices. The consultation he convened did more than smooth a single meeting; it became reference material for the engagements that followed. In 2024, that quiet, behind-the-scenes diplomacy earned him the Emily Aig-Imoukhuede Memorial Award.
