Jola Ayeye is famous for many things. But one of her quotes that’s always making rounds is
One thing about nigerian Women, we acheive!
If there’s one thing Nigerian women are not, it’s without ambition. What’s often missing isn’t the drive, it’s the information. The grants that open and close without enough people knowing. The fellowships that feel like they were written for someone else, until you actually read the eligibility criteria and realise they were written exactly for you. The jobs that get filled before the right person even hears about them.
Somewhere between LinkedIn’s noise and the WhatsApp group chat that somehow always shares the link three days after the deadline, a smarter ecosystem has been building. Women, Nigerian women, African women, who got tired of waiting for the information to reach them and decided to become the source themselves. They built newsletters. They curated job boards. They started communities where sharing what you know, when you know it, is treated as something close to a civic duty.
We call them opportunity banks and communities where you can actively shop for your next move, on your own terms, at your own pace. This Career Week, we’re spotlighting seven of them.
- SisterlyHQ Founded by Titilope Adedokun | sisterlyhq.com
The one that started a movement. Titilope Adedokun built SisterlyHQ to connect over 40,000 Nigerian women with transformative opportunities, training, and inclusive stories through digital technology. The platform covers jobs, internships, scholarships, fellowships, grants, prizes, and awards — updated every week without fail. What makes SisterlyHQ different is its ethos: they fiercely encourage you to apply even if you don’t meet all of the criteria, because men will apply even if they only meet 60% of the requirements — so you can too. Subscribe to the Substack newsletter, bookmark the opportunities board, and join the LinkedIn group. All free.
Where to find it: sisterlyhq.com/opportunities | Substack: sisterlyhq.substack.com
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- Scout Happy Founded by Teju Adeyinka | scouthappy.com
Teju Adeyinka built scouthappy.com as a board for helping talent in Africa discover global jobs and opportunities open to them. What sets it apart is the specificity of its filter: Scout Happy finds active opportunities online, filters them for accessibility to African applicants, and serves them up through the website. If you’re hunting for remote roles that are genuinely open to talent based on the continent, not just roles that say “remote” but mean “US timezone only”, this is the platform doing the filtering for you. Subscribe for weekly updates.
Where to find it: scouthappy.com
- Inclusively Remote Founded by Mary-Esther Anele | inclusivelyremote.com
Mary-Esther Anele created InclusivelyRemote as a remote job board and resource site designed to champion inclusive and equitable remote work opportunities, especially for Africans, and to support the growth of diverse remote startups. Sephora What’s particularly valuable here is the non-tech focus. Most remote job resources skew heavily toward engineering and product roles. Inclusively Remote actively addresses that gap, covering roles in operations, marketing, communications, legal, HR, and more. The Substack newsletter publishes every Monday and has reached over 100 editions. She’s also a career coach, if you need CV or LinkedIn support, she offers that too.
Where to find it: inclusivelyremote.com | Substack: inclusivelyremote.substack.com
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- African Writer Weekly Founded by Esohe Iyare | africanwriterweekly.substack.com
For writers, creatives, journalists, and literary-minded women, this is an essential subscribe. African Writer Weekly is a curated cocktail of writing competitions, publishing opportunities, grants, fellowships, and writings specifically for African writers, published every Wednesday at 5pm WAT, manually, by Iyare herself.
Where to find it: africanwriterweekly.substack.com
- She Leads Africa Co-founded by Yasmin Belo-Osagie & Afua Osei | sheleadsafrica.org
The OG. She Leads Africa came to life when co-founders Yasmin Belo-Osagie and Afua Osei met at an event in Lagos and bonded over their frustrations with the lack of attention given to female entrepreneurs in the global discourse surrounding African women. Duty Free Americas What began as a community for ambitious young African women has grown into a full ecosystem: newsletters segmented by career, money, and personal growth, programmes like the SLA BoostHer initiative in partnership with Jobberman, job boards, and events. If you haven’t already, join the community and subscribe to at least one of their newsletters. The career and money editions are particularly practical.
Where to find it: sheleadsafrica.org | Community: sheleadsafrica.org/community
- CareerBuddy Nigeria | mycareerbuddy.com
CareerBuddy is a Nigerian talent platform that does dual duty: it connects job seekers to employers, but it also operates a robust newsletter and content community that shares career opportunities, interview tips, salary negotiation resources, and industry insights specifically calibrated for the Nigerian professional market. They’ve been partners with SisterlyHQ and feature regularly in the broader Nigerian career ecosystem. Their newsletter is particularly sharp on roles at Nigerian tech companies, NGOs, and international organisations with offices in Nigeria.
Where to find it: mycareerbuddy.com
- Opportunity Desk opportunitydesk.org
Opportunity Desk is a pan-African, globally respected platform that has been consistently surfacing scholarships, fellowships, internships, grants, and competitions for young Africans — women prominently included — for over a decade. While it isn’t founded exclusively by Nigerian women, it is one of the most rigorously curated opportunity platforms on the continent and has championed Nigerian women leaders including SisterlyHQ’s Titilope Adedokun herself, naming her Young Person of the Month in November 2024. It’s free, exhaustive, and updates multiple times a week. Subscribe to the email digest and treat it as your macro opportunity radar.
Where to find it: opportunitydesk.org | Subscribe: opportunitydesk.org/subscribe
A note on how to use these well: Don’t subscribe to all 7 and let them pile up unread. Pick two or three that match where you are right now — your industry, your career stage, your ambitions — and actually engage with them. Apply. Share with someone who needs it. The women running these platforms are doing so, mostly, because they believe information shared becomes power distributed. The least we can do is act on it.