Victoria Ibezim-Ohaeri

Victoria Ibezim-Ohaeri is Executive Director at Spaces for Change and Youth Development. She is an SXSW 2013 honoree, a Brot fur die Welt scholar and Harvard University alumni. In her decade-long legal career and involvement in social and economic rights research and advocacy, she has traversed four continents: Africa, Europe, North America and South America, leading research investigations, documenting and exposing human rights violations, formulating and analyzing social and economic policy at national, regional and international levels. She has participated in major studies commissioned by UN-HABITAT, COHRE, MSI Integrity, Ford Foundation, CORDAID, IISD among others.

At SPACES FOR CHANGE |S4C (www.spacesforchange.org) where she currently serves as the executive director, she has designed and implemented development-focused and public advocacy projects which leveraged digital technology to crowdsource policy research data and used the results to execute high-profile community outreaches and social media campaigns that significantly stimulated citizen engagement in the development of oil policy reforms in Nigeria.

Victoria is also the country team lead in the ongoing multidisciplinary 4-year energy sector research program focusing on Nigeria, Bangladesh and India. The research seeks to investigate the stark gender inequalities in access to energy resources and build the evidence-base for developing policy reforms that can overcome these disparities in Nigeria. She also spent 7 years at SERAC, working as legal advisor and Program Manager, undertaking legal research in Nigeria, Congo, Germany and Kenya, which focused on injustices committed within natural resource exploitation zones, the human right impacts of oil operations, forced evictions and Boko Haram insurgency.

Victoria writes weekly columns in three Nigerian national dailies, with her public commentary focusing mainly on energy, environment, extractive industry, urban governance, gender and human rights. From her various engagements across sectors and continents, she has encountered the educational deficits grounding the need for a CTA intervention.