Josephine Wapakabulo, The First Founding Female CEO of a National Oil Company In Africa

In the spirit of International Women’s Month, we welcome you to Women of Valour, a series featuring open letters to women whose actions bring light not just to the nation, but to our hearts. We admire them, we cherish them, and want to be them.

We kick things off with Josephine Kasalamwa Wapakabulo, an electrical engineer and business executive,who has over 20 years of experience in effective leadership, team building, project management and innovation in multinational companies, across multiple continents.

She started out as a Leadership Trainee & Community Organizer in Coventry, a city in United Kingdom in 2000. Two years later, she moved to LSC Group Consulting in Lichfield, where she worked as a Research Associate. Four years later, she joined Rolls-Royce in Derby, United Kingdom as a Business Process & Information Engineering Specialist, serving in that capacity until 2011. She then moved to Rolls-Royce’s Berlin office to take on the role a Quality Executive and Chief of Quality and Continuous Improvement.

In 2014 she moved to Perth, Australia to serve as Chief Operating Officer at The Walk Free Foundation. She moved to Uganda in 2015 to consultancy in business, which she did diligently until she was appointed CEO of Uganda National Oil Company, the first ever chief executive officer of the oil body. To land this job, it is reported, that she beat over 37 contenders, most of them being men.

Wapakabulo holds a Global Executive MBA from INSEAD Business School in France, a PhD in Information Science, a Master’s in Information Technology and a Bachelor’s Degree in Electronic and Electrical Engineering from Loughborough University in the UK. She is also a registered Chartered Engineer in the Institute of Engineering and Technology in the UK.

She resigned from her position at UNOC in 2019 to focus on other opportunities.

We celebrate Dr. Wapakabulo for delivering value to the world with her knowledge and skills across various industries. She’s such an inspiration.

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