How Adepeju Sanusi is Redefining Global Infrastructure Standards

By Ugo Aliogo

When most people picture infrastructure, they think in skylines and overpasses, not line items and cost curves. They see cranes and concrete, not the spreadsheets, price indices, and risk models that determine whether those structures ever get built. Adepeju Sanusi has spent her career in that quieter arena—the place where a single misread market signal can stall a housing estate or derail a public works program. A trained quantity surveyor and construction project specialist, she has built a reputation around a deceptively simple idea: treat volatility as information, not catastrophe, and you can keep projects both affordable and resilient.

Sanusi came of age professionally in an environment where instability was a constant, not a shock. Working on construction sites in Nigeria and with globally supported projects, she saw budgets rewritten overnight by currency swings, materials that doubled in price between bid and delivery, and schedules shoved off course by weeks when a shipment sat in port. Those experiences left a mark. For her, the question stopped being “How do we avoid volatility?” and became “How do we model it, plan for it, and turn it into better decisions?”

What emerged from those early years was a conviction that the real competitive edge in construction is not simply superior engineering, but superior information: knowing what a cost spike means for cash flow three months from now, seeing how a delayed shipment will ripple through subcontractor schedules, and understanding when to renegotiate, redesign, or pause.

With a National Diploma and Bachelor’s degree in Quantity Surveying, followed by project management training, Sanusi set out to modernize the way cost and risk were handled on construction projects. While many colleagues were comfortable living inside static spreadsheets, she treated them as a starting point, not an endpoint. She pushed herself to master tools like Procore, Microsoft Project, and cloud-based collaboration platforms, using them to connect real-time site updates with the financial backbone of each project.

At Rasboh Integrated Services Limited, where she advanced from junior quantity surveyor to a more senior role, that mindset translated into results people could see. She built meticulous bills of quantities to sharpen bid accuracy, then tracked live costs against those baselines, flagging deviations early enough for teams to react. By pairing disciplined cost monitoring with active engagement of contractors and suppliers, she helped cut cost overruns on multiple projects—even as inflation kept pushing input prices upward. The work was not flashy, but it was quietly transformative: projects that might once have lurched from crisis to crisis instead moved with a steadier, more predictable rhythm.

Sanusi also learned that the most expensive mistakes rarely start in the ledger; they start in the gaps between people. Site disputes over unclear drawings, changes lost in email chains, decisions made on WhatsApp but never reflected in official records—these were the fault lines that kept reappearing.
To close them, she championed the use of tools like Microsoft Teams and other collaboration platforms to bring architects, site engineers, and project managers into the same real-time conversation. Design clarifications that once took days of back-and-forth could now be resolved in a quick virtual review. The shift cut down rework, reduced friction among teams, and nudged overall execution efficiency upward in ways that were easy to feel on site, even if no one stopped to name it.

As economic conditions tightened and supply chains grew more erratic, the construction industry was pushed into deeper uncertainty—higher borrowing costs, long lead times, and commodity prices that refused to stay put. At the same time, artificial intelligence began to move from research labs into project offices, promising to forecast everything from rebar prices to equipment downtime.

Where some saw a threat or a gimmick, Sanusi saw a chance to embed AI into the everyday machinery of project delivery. Years earlier, she had co-authored a framework for using AI to predict construction costs and manage risk, arguing that the technology only works when anchored to clear governance and practical workflows. In other words, algorithms are useful not because they are clever, but because they slot into how quantity surveyors, planners, and project managers already think and work. That argument, once ahead of its time, now feels increasingly like common sense.

Sanusi’s research has steadily broadened from cost control into sustainability, without ever losing sight of the bottom line. In work on green buildings, modular housing, low-carbon procurement, and circular-economy principles, she keeps returning to the same theme: data has to serve strategy. It is not enough to know what a project costs; decision-makers need to see how each choice plays out environmentally and socially as well.

She has contributed conceptual models that show how AI, building information modeling, and circular-economy ideas can be woven into procurement systems so that leaders can understand not just upfront prices, but long-term performance. Her publications are now part of conversations on how to deliver affordable housing and climate-resilient infrastructure in places where every naira or dollar must work harder.

Over time, Sanusi has taken on a broader role in the global conversation about construction, technology, and sustainability. She serves on editorial boards and reviews manuscripts for journals focused on engineering, technology, and environmental sciences, weighing in on work that ranges from smart cities and AI applications to sustainable infrastructure design.

Sanusi’s commitment to accessibility threads through her teaching and mentoring. In seminars and informal sessions alike, younger practitioners often show up hoping to learn “the latest software.” They usually leave with something more foundational: a new way of thinking about data.

She talks about bills of quantities as living documents rather than static forms; about logging site information so that it can actually support future analysis; about using well-structured project records as leverage in fairer negotiations with suppliers. Modular construction, prefabrication, and low-carbon materials feature often in her examples—not as fashionable buzzwords, but as practical tools for easing housing shortages and shrinking environmental footprints, provided professionals can understand their full life-cycle costs.

Sanusi’s work has increasingly drawn media attention. She continues to speak about modular housing as a response to housing deficits, about the role of emotional intelligence in managing diverse construction teams, and about what “smart infrastructure” can look like in economies grappling with uncertainty. These reveal another dimension of her leadership: a willingness to speak plainly about the pressure on site workers, project managers, and public officials who must deliver big promises with tight resources.

She often insists that emotional intelligence and communication sit alongside software and standards as core project tools. A well-timed conversation, in her view, can save as much money as a cleverly configured dashboard.

Colleagues rarely point to dramatic gestures when they talk about Sanusi’s leadership. Instead, they recall quiet but decisive interventions: a renegotiated supply timeline that avoided penalties, a procurement schedule rearranged when exchange rates turned hostile, a documentation system reworked so that audits no longer triggered panic.

These are not moments that attract ribbon-cuttings or headlines. But in aggregate, they are the moves that keep projects on track when conditions get rough. Each cost spike, each delay at a port, becomes a data point feeding back into stronger contracts and more realistic forecasts, a practical expression of her belief that volatility, properly understood, can be tamed.

Underpinning her work is a clear link to global sustainability goals. Sanusi has written on circular economy integration, bio-based materials, building-integrated carbon capture, and climate-resilient infrastructure, always pushing beyond short-term fixes. Her work on modular construction for sustainable housing, climate-adaptive building envelopes, and AI-enabled smart-city solutions points toward an infrastructure sector that is low-carbon, inclusive, and resilient enough to withstand climate shocks.

She argues that quantity surveyors and project managers can no longer afford to treat carbon metrics and environmental performance as someone else’s job. Fluency in those dimensions, she believes, belongs right alongside schedule compression and cash-flow forecasting.

Sanusi’s current affiliations mirror the breadth of her interests. In addition to memberships in project management and civil engineering bodies, she holds fellowships in management and strategy organizations that focus on leadership and innovation. These roles give her a platform to advocate for procurement reforms, ethical standards, and governance structures that prioritize long-term infrastructure quality over short-term cost cutting.

She often describes governance as the “invisible scaffolding” of sustainable infrastructure: the policies, checks, and routines that no one notices when they work, but whose absence becomes obvious when projects fail.

If there is a throughline in Sanusi’s story, it is that meaningful change in construction rarely arrives as a single breakthrough. It comes instead through a sequence of disciplined, cumulative choices: designing better cost models, documenting site conditions more rigorously, questioning inherited procurement habits, insisting that each project leave the system slightly stronger than it found it.

Her legacy, still unfolding, sits in those accumulated shifts, project by project, journal article by journal article, mentee by mentee. In a field that often celebrates concrete milestones and ceremonial openings, Adepeju Sanusi has chosen a quieter but no less consequential terrain. Her work in digital cost management, AI-enabled risk frameworks, sustainable procurement, and knowledge-sharing networks is quietly redefining what it means to deliver infrastructure “to standard.”
For her, global standards are not distant targets set by remote boards; they are the daily practices and decisions that allow bridges, housing estates, and public facilities to be delivered on time, within budget, and with a clear-eyed view of the climate future they must survive