An unmapped village. A community overlooked for development. A disaster response slowed by missing data. Those are the kinds of problems Omowonuola Akintola has spent her career trying to solve.
Through geospatial data, she has helped governments and humanitarian organisations better understand the places they serve—from identifying underserved communities for rural electrification projects to supporting disaster response. .
“If we can help more communities become more visible, maybe there will be a lot more people interested in developing those communities,” she says.
It is a belief that has shaped every step of her career.
Unlike many people who can trace their careers to a childhood dream, Omowonuola Akintola simply followed the opportunities in front of her.
Growing up in Osogbo, the Osun State capital in Western Nigeria, reading was her favourite pastime growing up. For a while, she imagined herself studying Economics simply because her older brother wanted to. “I would not say I had interest because I understood why it was necessary for the world,” she says. “I just had interest.”
Her father, an urban planner, had other ideas. He encouraged his children to pursue courses related to his profession, believing they would offer meaningful careers.
Akintola first studied Surveying and Geoinformatics at The Polytechnic, Ede, between 2011 and 2013. After earning a National Diploma in Surveying and Geoinformatics from The Polytechnic, Ede, she applied to study the same discipline at Obafemi Awolowo University. The programme was not yet available. When OAU introduced it the following year, she gained admission through Direct Entry.
“I think it was just a chance because it was the year I got into OAU that they actually started the course,” she says. “It was just a new thing of trying to see how technology can be included into the land surveying course.”
As she settled into the programme, Akintola discovered that what interested her wasn’t measuring land. It was using technology to understand it.
“I didn’t want to do land survey. It felt boring to me. I wasn’t really interested in that,” she says. “I just felt like it would make sense to sort of focus more on the technological part of it.”
As her studies progressed, she immersed herself in programming languages, desktop software and geospatial tools, while taking online courses offered by organisations in the geospatial sector to sharpen the technical skills hoping they would open opportunities beyond Nigeria. .
“I was more focused on trying to understand the technical parts,” she says. “It felt more comfortable to me and there are more opportunities in that part of the field across the globe.”
Seeing data shape decisions
After graduating in 2020, Akintola got her first opportunity to put the technical skills she had spent years building into practice. She joined OEA Consult Limited in Lagos as a Graduate Assistant, supporting hydrology projects with data analysis.
“It was nice to leave school and immediately have some real-life experience,” she says. “Seeing how the things I’d been learning in school could really be used in real projects was really interesting.”
Later that year, as the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted work and travel, she returned to Osogbo to be with her family.
A friend soon introduced her to a remote role at a German energy consulting firm supporting the Nigeria Energy Support Programme (NESP). Over the next two years, she applied geospatial analysis to rural electrification and agricultural projects across Nigeria and Ethiopia.
One of the projects focused on communities beyond Nigeria’s national grid. Before developers could decide where to extend the grid or deploy solar mini-grids, they first needed to understand the communities they hoped to serve.
Akintola’s job was to turn satellite imagery into datasets that helped estimate the infrastructure and investment each community would require.
“Everything we do in geospatial is location-based,” she says. “Before you want to do any work in a place, you need to understand what is in that place.”
Beyond Nigeria, she also worked on projects in Ethiopia, analysing crop types, groundwater availability and land size to estimate the energy needed to power irrigation systems. But one assignment stayed with her long after it ended.
Years after electricity had been introduced to some rural communities, the team returned to assess whether access to power had actually improved people’s lives.
“We were looking at satellite imagery to see if there had been some changes within those communities that we could use to evaluate how much the electrification had supported them,” she recalls.
The assignment reinforced what had first drawn her to the technological side of surveying. The project confirmed that the work she enjoyed most wasn’t producing maps; it was producing evidence that shaped decisions. That, she realised, was where she wanted to make an impact.
When the data wasn’t ours
By 2022, Akintola wanted to apply her geospatial skills beyond infrastructure projects. She was drawn to humanitarian work, where mapping could help communities before and after disasters.
“There are a lot of places where resources are scarce and being able to see how data can help people who are trying to solve problems for those places is something to support,” she says. “So, I felt like maybe it would be interesting to go into the development, data-for-good sector.”
That year, she joined the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), an international non-governmental organisation that creates open geospatial data for humanitarian and disaster response. As a geospatial analyst, she worked with satellite imagery to build maps used by governments, aid organisations and emergency responders.
Her team combined satellite imagery with local knowledge to create and update maps before and after disasters. Community members helped validate the maps, adding context that could not be seen from space.
“We get to work with communities who live in the area and they provide context,” she says. “If you create a map and they feel like, ‘Maybe this map is wrong because I’m there, I know that,’ they use their local knowledge to make the map more useful and more accurate.”
Her work took on new urgency when the 2023 Morocco earthquake struck. As disaster responders raced to reach affected communities, Akintola and her team were unable to access the high-resolution satellite imagery they needed to map the hardest-hit areas quickly.
“That earthquake in Morocco got me a bit angry,” she says.
Much of the imagery was owned by companies outside Africa, meaning access often depended on whether it was released for humanitarian use.
“We wanted to help people on the ground, but we didn’t have access to the imagery we needed because it was very expensive,” she says. “So you just have to try to make use of what you have available.”
The experience crystallised a question that had been forming in her mind: how could African teams respond to disasters if they depended on critical data controlled elsewhere? It was a question that would shape the next chapter of her career.
Building Africa’s own tools
The frustration Akintola felt during the Morocco earthquake did not end with the disaster response. It stayed with her long after the emergency was over, convincing her that Africa needed to do more than rely on geospatial technologies and data developed elsewhere.
In 2024, she moved to France to pursue a master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence for Earth Observation through the Erasmus programme, where she is exploring how AI and computer vision can improve lower-resolution satellite imagery when higher-resolution data is unavailable.
“I felt like maybe there would be a way AI could actually help,” she says. “Is there a way we can take this low-resolution imagery and make it high resolution, so that we don’t really have to wait for people who are providing this imagery?”
But the deeper she immersed herself in AI, the more she realised that better technology alone would not solve Africa’s challenges. The geospatial sector also needed stronger policies, institutions and investment to thrive.
“When I started this journey, I felt like, ‘We can just build a startup and start creating solutions,'” she says. “But then I realised that if we don’t have strong policies that back some of these niche technologies, they don’t really grow.”
She points to electric vehicles and cryptocurrencies as examples of technologies whose adoption depends as much on regulation as innovation.
“A lot of people think the technology they have access to is just there,” she says. “But policy drives how technology is used or not used.”
She sees the African Union’s inauguration of the African Space Agency (AfSA) in 2025 as an encouraging sign that the continent is beginning to take its space economy more seriously. But she believes governments and regional institutions must invest much more in research, shared space infrastructure and the policies that will allow the sector to thrive. Without that commitment, Africa risks remaining dependent on technologies and data developed elsewhere.
That conviction has expanded Akintola’s mission beyond building geospatial solutions to strengthening the ecosystem that supports them.
She now mentors students and young professionals interested in geospatial technology, helping them apply for postgraduate opportunities while encouraging more Africans to consider careers in a field that remains largely overlooked across the continent.
“I’ve spoken to a lot of people who’ll say, ‘I didn’t know we have geospatial people in Nigeria,'” she says. “We exist.”
Ultimately, Akintola’s goal is to establish a research lab dedicated to applying geospatial technology, Earth observation and artificial intelligence to African challenges.
“My intention is to start a research lab using space technology, geospatial and AI to look at how we can really solve our own problems,” she says. “It will be mostly Africans solving African problems.”
For Akintola, the goal is to ensure more Africans understand, invest in and build the geospatial technologies that will help solve the continent’s own problems.
“I should be remembered as that human who did her best to bring awareness to Africa,” she says. “I need all of us to care about space.”
True scale demands moving beyond surface-level integrations to robust execution. We’ve filtered the noise out of Moonshot 2026, optimising the conference strictly for high-calibre connections between startup founders, global financial operators, enterprise leaders and individuals rewiring Africa’s technical frameworks. Get 20% off Early Bird tickets for a limited time.
Comments
Post a Comment