Context Into Code: Abosede George-Ogan Is Building the Software Behind Women’s Advancement in Africa

By Folalumi Alaran

She spent two decades advancing women’s leadership by hand. Now she is rebuilding that work as software, the WILAN Suite, a digital ecosystem for career advancement and leadership development, with more to come.

For most of her career, Abosede George-Ogan advanced women’s leadership through advocacy and programmes. Now she is building it as software. Her thesis is simple: the work she spent twenty years doing by hand, mentoring, training, connecting women and opening doors, can be rebuilt as digital infrastructure that reaches far more people than any workshop ever could. The result is the WILAN Suite.

Running through her approach is an insistence on evidence over assertion. “A lot of times we make generic statements about women’s leadership,” she has said. “Is it data-driven?” WILAN’s answer is to build the data itself. The organisation has published what Abosede describes as Nigeria’s first state-of-women’s-leadership report and dashboard, opened to any citizen rather than reserved for policymakers: select a state and see how many women sit in its assembly, how many female commissioners it has, and whether any women represent it in the Senate or House, across sectors such as health. It turns a question usually answered with an anecdote into something you can look up.

The Suite extends that same instinct from measurement to action. Biird, built by WILAN Institute, is career infrastructure for women: a platform for professional networking, mentorship and structured advancement, designed to replace the chance connections and scattered networks that only a well-placed few ever benefit from. Alongside it, the Learn App, also from the Institute, is an online academy delivering tiered training programmes, courses and masterclass for women leaders, from those just emerging into leadership to those operating at executive level. Together they take the kind of guidance that once lived inside expensive, one-off seminars and make it something a woman can carry in her pocket.

What turns these from separate apps into an ecosystem is the engineering underneath. The Suite runs on a single, shared identity system: one sign-on, built on a dedicated authentication server, lets a user move across the platforms without managing separate accounts, while each product keeps its own data. It is the kind of architecture that signals a genuine software platform rather than a set of disconnected tools, and it is the connective thread Abosede has designed the wider ecosystem around.

More products are on the way, each aimed at a problem Abosede has spent her career going up against: making governance more transparent and participatory, giving women running for office the strategy and tools to navigate the political landscape, and protecting women from the technology-facilitated abuse that so often follows visibility and drives them out of public life.

The move into technology is less a pivot than a return to form. WILAN itself began as a digital community she set up after searching online for guidance on how a woman might run for office and finding nothing useful.

It became a formal organisation only when a funder wanted to give money and discovered there was no registered body to receive it. The instinct to build a tool where one was missing has been there from the very start.

What changed across two decades of development work, from the Lagos State Employment Trust Fund to ActionAid to founding WILAN, was the conviction that advocacy without infrastructure has a ceiling. Each tool in the Suite is a bottleneck she once worked through by hand, now rebuilt as software that can scale. “We want to be able to quantify that,” she has said of women’s leadership, “through technology.”

That is the bet, and the build: a layer of software that takes a cause long argued in slogans and turns it into something women can use, and a country can see.