It starts in an elevator in Paris, France.
On Saturday, April 4, 2026, Amara Uyanna was trying to catch a 10 a.m. flight, mentally checking off her usual work-travel list. Her suitcase in hand, she made her way to the lowest floor of a Parisian hotel where she had lodged; the elevator doors slid open, and she walked in. There, a stranger stepped in, whispering, almost to himself, “Bismillah.” Without thinking, she answered, “Bismillah,” too, their first connection in a foreign land.
When they got out of the elevator, they realised they were both headed to the airport. The man was still trying to find a ride. Uyanna, who was in a hurry to catch her flight, offered to share her Uber with him.
In the car, they fell into an easy conversation, switching between Arabic and English; the stranger and the Uber driver were surprised that she could speak Arabic.
Uyanna recalls this specific camaraderie fondly.
It is a snapshot of how she moves through the world: switching languages, sectors, and continents like she switches tabs on a laptop.
She works as the Chief of Staff at Schneider Electric, the global energy firm, yet her life and work history read like the itinerary of a perpetual commuter between worlds: oil and gas, global policy, media, fintech, crypto, and energy; Nigeria, the United States, the Middle East, Europe, and Southeast Asia.
“The vision is [to be] a global expert,” she told me. But that vision started far from Paris. This is the life of Uyanna, a globe-trotter.
The scholarship child who wanted to run Chevron
Uyanna grew up in Lagos, where she finished primary school before winning a scholarship to Nigerian Turkish International College (NTIC) in Abuja for high school. She went on to Louisiana Tech University in Ruston, Louisiana, United States, to study Chemical Engineering & French. At a young age, she wanted to be the Managing Director of a global oil company, and for a while, she was on course to achieve that goal.
In the summer of 2015, she landed an internship at the Nigerian subsidiary of ExxonMobil, the multinational oil and gas firm. It came with the prestige she had dreamt about as a kid: the exposure, the above-average stipends, and other little privileges she earned from working in a Fortune 500 company.
During her internship, she visited the Qua Iboe Terminal, a crude oil export facility in Akwa Ibom State, southern Nigeria.
It felt like a dream assignment on paper: a front-row seat to the industry she’d always wanted to lead. But the reality was different. She watched as crude oil spills stained the waterways that the local communities depended on. She watched people cough in the air they were supposed to breathe, and she saw crops die in ways that felt anything but natural.
The work she had romanticised, she realised, was not as she had thought. It was rather an occupational hazard for the people living in a resource-rich region that did not feel rich at all.
Her quasi-honeymoon ended after that experience. In its place, a single, stubborn question took root: why wasn’t a multinational company held to the same environmental standards in Nigeria as it was abroad?
The answers she found were not enough. She went looking for better tools.
After her graduation in 2016, Uyanna felt her Chemical Engineering background was no longer enough. To change the rules, she realised, she had to sit in rooms where the rules were written.
She enrolled for a master’s in global policy at The Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin, in the US, focusing on development, innovation, and economics. In March 2016, during a summer break, she joined Sustainability International, a nonprofit working to clean up the Niger Delta region.
But philanthropy has its own bottleneck: donors were far removed from the affected region, she realised.
“I said to my boss [at Sustainability International], ‘let’s make a virtual reality documentary, so that way, we’ll be able to bridge the empathy gap,’” said Uyanna. “And even if people haven’t heard of where we are talking about, once they wear those headsets, we’ll take them there.”
Al Jazeera had just launched its Virtual Reality (VR) unit, Contrast VR, in 2017. Uyanna pitched the global media company a VR documentary that would visually pull people into the creeks of the Niger Delta, rather than just read about it. Al Jazeera said yes.
By May 2017, she was back in Nigeria with a six-person Al Jazeera crew, searching for a woman whose story would anchor the film. They chose a woman because Uyanna felt that when systems fail, women absorb the shock first and longest, and putting her at the centre would force the viewers to confront the human cost they usually scroll past.
“Every time there is some sort of systemic imbalance, women pay the price more,” she said.
The film followed Lessi Phillips, who was 16 when an oil pipeline burst in Bodo, a coastal town in Rivers State, southern Nigeria, in 2008, causing a major spill linked to the multinational oil firm Shell.
The VR documentary, “Oil in Our Creeks,” highlighted the environmental impact of oil spills on mangrove swamps and the Bodo community’s ten-year fight for justice, cleanup, and recovery.
The documentary premiered at film festivals in Amsterdam, Rio de Janeiro, and Vancouver, raising the funds needed for at least one pilot clean-up project. One of the villages needed $25,000 to clean up after the spills; the team raised well over that amount, according to Uyanna.
The callback that rerouted her career
Months after the documentary premiered, Uyanna was back in the US, splitting her time between policy classes and her nonprofit work. Then the email came. Al Jazeera wanted her back. This time, not as a filmmaker, but inside the machine that made stories possible.
The network had an opening in its business operations unit for a programme manager.
Uyanna had never imagined herself working in news. But when she read the mission statement, something clicked: “to be fearless in the pursuit of truth and to be the voice of the voiceless.” It felt like a corporate version of the questions that had been keeping her up at night since Qua Iboe.
She said yes to Al Jazeera.
While completing her master’s in the US, she worked as a Technical Programme Manager at the network, building systems that connected the tech teams to finance, HR, legal, and editorial. Where other people saw “operations,” she saw a backstage wiring that made a global newsroom run.
When she graduated in 2018, Al Jazeera went a step further. The company filed a freelance contractor visa so she could relocate to Qatar. When she landed in Doha, the country’s capital city, she converted it into a full-time residency permit.
The freelance visa, which often requires sponsorship from a local entity, allowed Uyanna to legally live and work in the country for two years, opening a new chapter in her life in the Middle East.
Choosing the harder room
Doha, for Uyanna, was the pivot point.
By 2018, she was living in a city where skyscrapers rose out of the desert and where the two dominant industries—media and energy—were both on her résumé.
Her tech-adjacent role at Al Jazeera meant she spent her days with ex-AWS and ex-Azure engineers, exposing her to how software development architectures worked.
After two years and three months at her second stint at Al Jazeera, she realised she was standing at a fork: go deeper into pure tech, or walk away.
Uyanna walked away. But not very far.
Qatar’s other dominant player was QatarEnergy, the state-owned energy giant. If she was going to re-enter the sector that had shaken her in Akwa Ibom,, she wanted to do so on different terms. She wanted to build sustainable development practices from the inside, and not just critique from the outside.
She did something that feels very on-brand for her story: she bypassed the front door.
She found the executive she wanted to work with, reached out directly on LinkedIn, followed up with a phone call, and pitched herself. His reply came in under thirty minutes.
“[It’s] a moment in my career I can never forget,” she recalled. “The speed, the validation of my competence. I won’t forget it anytime soon.”
The opportunity she proposed—to build the company’s sustainable development strategy—didn’t technically exist yet at QatarEnergy. But her would-be boss was hiring for a global joint venture assets portfolio position and thought she could do that and build the sustainability function in parallel.
He offered her both. She said yes—for the next year and ten months.
From energy to fintech
After nearly two years at QatarEnergy, managing joint-venture assets while drafting rules for the company’s global sustainability engagement, her time in Doha had run its course. In December 2021, she returned to Nigeria for a hiatus.
For eight months, she stepped off the treadmill.
Yet she was soon back, gearing up to continue the impact work that has driven her since she was a kid. But this time, she joined a fintech; impact could wait, it seemed.
In February 2022, she joined Rise, a Nigerian investment startup, as Chief Operating Officer (COO), a fast-moving, software-led consumer-facing venture she was completely new to. This didn’t deter her.
“I think that while energy is the foundation of the economy,” Uyanna said. “Finance and tech are the fuel that keeps things going.”
She left Rise after four months and joined Lazerpay, another Nigerian fintech that was powering cross-border payments with cryptocurrencies. Uyanna joined as the Head of Middle East and Africa (MEA) Partnerships.
At first, her colleagues weren’t sure of what to make of her, she shared. She wasn’t a “blockchain person,” as co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO) Abdulfatai Suleiman of the now-shuttered startup remembers. But that scepticism didn’t last long.
Within her brief three-month stint at Lazerpay, she was quickly promoted to COO. Uyanna left the role in October 2022. She still had her eyes and mind set on the energy sector.
Uyanna was keen on a senior role. The same year, she returned to class for a master’s in business administration (MBA) degree at the Institut Européen d’administration des Affaires (INSEAD), a business school with campuses in Fontainebleau (France) and Singapore. Abu Dhabi. She began to roam the world freely again. She spent eight months in France and three months in Singapore.
“The global policy gave me a really good understanding of the power structures in the world and the geopolitics of the world,” she said. “Coming from chemical engineering and then policy, I never really got what I felt like was strong business foundations. I [always] learned on the job.”
The programme also widened her sense of how different cultures hold on to themselves while modernising.
“Asia, as a continent, does a good job of holding on to its culture while adopting Western values,” she said. “They hold on to what is theirs, what is historic, what is old, while also making space for the tech and the newness.”
In Africa, she argued, the rate of holding on to cultural history is radically low.
The Geometric Power experiment
In 2024, shortly after wrapping up her MBA programme, Uyanna was back in the job market for a role at a sector she was familiar with: energy, but this time, a more expansive segment than oil and gas.
Schneider Electric came calling, offering her a role as a Strategy Manager for Power Systems and Global Services. The job was based in New York, the US, a country where she had lived for some years studying and contributing to nonprofit work back home.
It was the kind of role many people would have jumped into immediately. But she made a different decision: she would spend time in Nigeria’s power sector first. The role only resumed in a few months, giving her a four-month cushion to consult at Geometric Power, an energy company based in Aba, a city in eastern Nigeria.
She reached out to Geometric Power and offered her services at a reduced rate, framing it as a consulting engagement. The role would allow her to stay based in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city, while working deeply in the business.
What mattered to her was learning the business of the trade and the nuance of Nigeria’s power market, applying it to her oil and gas experience. She was preparing herself for her big role at Schneider Electric.
She flew into Lagos on Saturday, February 24, 2024, two days before the commissioning of Geometric’s power plant. She led conversations with partners, and whenever she was available, she was present for the company’s field work.
As shared by Blessing Ogbe, former COO of Aba Power, Uyanna contributed directly to the company’s revenue line, helping reach ₦1 billion ($652,771) in May 2024—a first milestone in its history.
Ogbe credited the revenue jump to specific changes Uyanna pushed. One of them was a gamified rewards system for teams, which produced ₦200 million ($130,554) increase in cash-in-hand after the first month alone.
Language was also part of the strategy, Ogbe mentioned.
“She understands more than one language, so it’s easier for her,” Ogbe told me over a call in June 2025. “When we get to some meetings, she uses the native language to communicate to see that people bought into the idea of accepting our business transactions.”
In a city, and even a country by extension, where power bills and trust had a long, complicated history, speaking to people in her language they joked and argued in made the business case easier to accept.
Uyanna is also quick to credit her team.
“Engineer Blessing did the heavy lifting,” she said. ”I just came at the right time, when they were crossing over from all the work they had put in.”
After her work with Geometric Power, Uyanna felt she was ready to take on another challenge at Schneider Electric, one that catapulted her to a managerial role in the energy sector for the first time in her storied career.
In June 2024, Uyanna travelled to New York, the United States, to begin life as a Strategy Manager for Power Systems and Global Services at the firm.
The strategist in New York
Her job at Schneider Electric was to help a company built on hardware—transformers, circuit breakers, and physical infrastructure—shift into a world where services, subscriptions, data, and predictive maintenance are just as important as equipment.
There, she worked with the teams to identify how to grow recurring revenue along important business offers in the markets where they operated.
Her fintech and crypto years turned out to be more than a detour. Watching companies like Lazerpay decide how to price and bundle their products became a mental template she could now apply to industrial energy.
In April 2026, she was promoted to Chief of Staff to the Global Head of Services Division, a business with a portfolio in the billions of euros and a footprint in every geography where Schneider operates, giving Uyanna travel access to 31 countries where she has visited today.
Having lived, studied, and worked across Africa, the United States, the Middle East, Europe, and Asia, she is now part of a global team that spans almost every time zone.
Her multi-continental journey across energy infrastructure and oil and gas has taught her about taking radical bets on herself and valuing the connections she makes along her daily commuting work life. Uyanna carries this experience with her as a critical part of her identity.
“The more you know about the different parts of the world, the better you’re able to navigate as a leader,” she said.
* Exchange rate as of May 2024: $1 = ₦1,531.
What did you think of this edition, and what would you love to read next on Digital Nomads? Share your thoughts and ideas with us here.
