Olukemi Ibikunle, a corrections officer from Lagos, Nigeria, has just won the UN Trailblazer Award for Women Justice and Corrections Officers for her current work as a peacekeeper in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She explains her recent achievement in a PassBlue interview. LOEY FELIPE/UN PHOTO
Olukemi Ibikunle, 43, cracked the code for getting establishments to break new ground. In Nigeria, where government processes can be slow and bureaucracy creates obstacles that can stifle innovations, Ibikunle as a corrections official, got the authority to literally knock down the wall of Nigeria’s oldest prison to create a service gate for deliveries of large supplies into the fortress and evacuating human waste out.
“Why are you bringing all these foreign things here? Things that have never been done before,” her civil service boss back in Nigeria once told her as she suggested yet another project to improve the lives of inmates in the country. She proposed and led the installation of a biogas system, a renewable-energy source, in the Kirikiri Maximum Security Custodial Center, in Lagos, housing the most-hardened criminals. That was in 2018.
Only a few years later, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a driving distance of 2,073 miles from Lagos, Ibikunle, as a United Nations peacekeeper, convinced the Congolese government to include a library and recreational activities into prisons in the country. But perhaps the toughest success for her was getting the same government, weighed down by decades-long fights with a range of rebel groups, to agree to creating a prison system respecting the dignity of inmates and protecting incarcerated women from sexual violence.
Ibikunle and her team of correctional experts with the UN peacekeeping mission in the Congo, called Monusco, developed a policy and a construction prototype that was adopted by the Kinshasa government to improve aspects of the country’s prison system.
On Oct. 8, Ibikunle won the 2025 UN Trailblazer Award for Women Justice and Corrections Officers, recognized for her work blazing a trail in a field dominated by men.
Now based in Beni, eastern Congo, Ibikunle, a mother of two children, joined Monusco in 2020, before the escalation of the sectarian war in that region. She was faced with numerous challenges, one of which was language. Ibikunle spoke English and her local language, Yoruba.
When she had worked in Lagos, those languages were sufficient. English is the language of business in Nigeria; and most people in Lagos, in southwest Nigeria, speak Yoruba or pidgin English. But in Goma, the Congolese city in eastern DRC where Ibikunle began as a peacekeeper, French is the official language. The locals also speak Swahili and Lingala, languages that were also foreign to Ibikunle.
After two years of living in Goma, the capital of North Kivu Province, where most UN peacekeeping in the Congo is carried out, Ibikunle’s growing proficiency in French was tested. She was asked to address a global audience of colleagues who spoke French and English. The easiest option, she thought, would be to make her presentation in English with the risk of alienating the Francophone members of the audience.
“I decided to take the bull by the horn,” Ibikunle wrote in a LinkedIn post a year ago. “[I] prepared my slides in English, and on 17 July 2024, presented my thoughts in French for 15 minutes non-stop for the first time in my life. I expressed myself confidently, not just in a friendly conversation with colleagues but in front of a live audience of professionals from all over the world.”
Her original job in prison corrections in Nigeria began after she took the bull by the horn and left her banking job to take up a seemingly thankless, often overlooked civil service job in Lagos, putting her degree as a geology engineer to work to help solve problems in the Nigerian Correctional Service, then known as the Nigerian Prison Service.
When the call came from the UN for Nigeria to contribute officers to the Justice and Corrections service of Monusco, Nigeria presented one of its best civil servants, a woman with a proven record of resilience, determination and dedication to international standards able to manage prison infrastructure.
Dressed in a perfectly starched ceremonial uniform of the Nigerian Correctional Service and wearing a UN peacekeeping-blue beret, Ibikunle sat last week in a conference room on the 34th floor of UN headquarters in New York City, just a few hours after receiving the Trailblazer Award. She talked with PassBlue about her journey and motivation and shared ideas on how prison services can be improved throughout Africa.
The Trailblazer Award was created in 2022 by the UN Justice and Corrections Service of the Office for the Rule of Law and Security Institutions. The award, sponsored by Canada, was designed to honor the leadership and innovation of women correctional officers in peacekeeping. The interview has been edited and condensed. — DAMILOLA BANJO
PassBlue: What has it been like since the nomination and winning the award?
Ibikunle: The nomination was inspired by colleagues who felt that I should be nominated for this award. When I saw the shortlisted candidates and I was one of five, I was really happy. Corrections officers generally seem to be in the background. In almost every country you go to, people think of being a corrections officer or a prison officer as the last resort. So, getting this nomination and winning has been an awesome journey. It gives me more pride in my work. It makes me feel that what I do matters. It makes me feel like I can make a change, and I am making a change. So it’s been good.
PassBlue: Tell us about your journey to becoming a corrections officer.
Ibikunle: I trained as a project manager, and later I specialized in construction project management. Before I joined the prison service in Nigeria, I worked in a bank. I found banking to be very boring. Because my thing has always been to make a change. I mean to build something, to create something that makes other people happy. So, I got into the prison service not to be friends with inmates but to follow up on that passion and willingness to create something that makes other people happy. When I got into it, I was in charge of Lagos State infrastructure for the five prisons there.
By the time I was made the Works Officer of Lagos State Command, it helped to bring out what was inside of me, because I was directly in charge of all the infrastructure in the state command. I was now sure that this is what I wanted to do. I was not afraid or ashamed of being a prison officer.
PassBlue: It’s safe to assume that you had moments of doubt on the job. How did you overcome that?
Ibikunle: I definitely had doubts. I had moments of: “Oh, my God, what am I doing here? Why did I leave the bank?” My frustration was not the job. My frustration was the people and their level of reasoning and vision. But what I realized is that when you’re different, there’s a way you influence your environment. When I started bringing initiatives, I would go to my controller — the head of Lagos State was referred to as the Controller of Prisons, now Controller of Corrections for Lagos State — and say, “I have this idea.” He would say: “Why are you bringing all these foreign things here? Things that have never been done before?” I’d say, “We can change our approach.” And he would say, “O.K., go and put it into writing.” Gradually, people embraced change, and with time, I began to feel at home.
So, I was doing my job consistently [in Nigeria] until the call for nomination came. And because of the way I’ve distinguished myself in the service, when the call for nomination came and it was about women, my name came up. I didn’t know anything like that came up, but because I had made a difference in the service, I’d done so many initiatives, I’d pushed for projects that were impossible. . . . So it was already registered in people’s minds that there’s something different about this person.
PassBlue:. Most prison officers are men. How are you navigating being a woman in that tough space?
Ibikunle: Backstory: how I became the Officer in Charge for Lagos State Command. Somebody was going on retirement, so I knew that post was going to be vacant, and I went to see the controller to say, “Please, I want you to know that I’m interested in that position.” He said: “You? A woman? No, I don’t want you to have problems with me, because if I give you this post and you’re not there when you’re supposed to be there, you’re going to have issues with me. So, please stay off.”
And I told him: “No, I know it’s tough. I know I have to be on site at all hours.” I convinced him that I could do it. I’m a firm believer in competence does not have gender. That has always been my driving force, even though it’s been a male-dominated environment.
PassBlue: Let’s talk about some of the projects you did in Lagos and some that you did in the Congo that got you nominated for the UN Trailblazer award.
Ibikunle: In Nigeria, I proposed building a new service gate that could allow fire trucks and other support vehicles into the prison. The International Committee of the Red Cross sent my idea to their headquarters and got back to me in three weeks with funding approval if I could secure clearance from the [federal prison] service. I wrote a 10-page proposal to justify the gate and its security features. After a tough approval process, the project was funded, I managed the construction and it was completed in 2019. It solved both sewage and food delivery problems and became a model replicated in other facilities. I had also managed a biogas project at a maximum prison in Lagos. That experience helped me introduce the first biogas system in the DRC, at Uvira Prison. It was commissioned in 2021 and still works. That project contributed to my UN Trailblazer Award.
In the Congo, I went on to design a national prison prototype because existing plans lacked basics like libraries, workshops and religious spaces. I created tailored models for juveniles, women and the general population, emphasizing rehabilitation and separation. The government adopted the prototype as policy. I also designed a high-risk detention block because inmates of different offense levels were mixed together. We built a 120-capacity model, with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime handling rehabilitation and UNITA training staff. It was well received and set a benchmark, just like the biogas project.
PassBlue: What are common challenges that you’ve observed in how correctional activities are done in Africa and what are the low hanging fruit for reforms?
Ibikunle: A common problem in prison administration across Africa is funding. The national government doesn’t prioritize prisons; you see the military getting this huge budgetary allocation. But the prison, you have to scramble, you have to force, you have to justify why you need this budget that is nowhere near what the other security agencies are getting. When we talk about prison reforms, engagement of detainees needs to improve, and I think Nigeria is doing a lot about that now, making sure these people are not just eating and sleeping and waking up. They have to be productive. They have to generate revenue. How can we put them on the farm and work?
PassBlue: What are the models that you’ve seen in “saner climes,” as we say, that you think can be replicated for juvenile correction in Africa?
Ibikunle: We should focus on their continuing education. Depending on the age of the child, make sure the child continues to go to school. If somehow the child is learning a skill, make sure that does not stop. Or even if the child has not learned a skill, it can start while in detention, so that when he leaves, he is not going back to crime because he already has something to do. The post-release support is also important. When we teach them the skills, do we give them the basic material to start up? It’s not enough for me to learn tailoring in detention; by the time I leave, do I have at least one sewing machine that I can start with? We should not treat juveniles as criminals, because they are children. Yes, they might have done some crazy things but they are still children.
PassBlue: What is your message for young women who are working in law enforcement?
Ibikunle: They should maximize whatever opportunity they have. They should take advantage of where they are, because in my experience, I’ve seen people trivialize the civil service. So, I would like to encourage young women to take it seriously, put in their best, because we are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses. People are watching, even when you think you’re just doing your own thing. It’s also important for young women to develop competence. Don’t use your gender as a weapon. Don’t think that somebody is victimizing you because you’re a fine girl. No. Do your job and be competent, and I believe that you will always get a place around the table.
PassBlue: What’s the next step for you?
Ibikunle: I will go back to DRC, continue my work. People make plans for the long term, but I believe in living in the moment, making the best of what comes your way. That’s me.
