Recognised at the 2023 Nigeria Technology Awards, Terragon’s COO has become one of the continent’s most watched operating executives
In a Lagos ballroom this month, the Nigeria Technology Awards handed a first-of-its-kind honour to an executive whose name is increasingly familiar to anyone tracking Africa’s data economy. Chifum Ann Ukadike, Chief Operating Officer of Terragon Limited, was named the sole recipient of a newly created award for outstanding contributions to the growth and development of Nigerian women in technology — the latest marker of a reputation that has been building well beyond Nigeria’s borders.
Ukadike is the operator behind one of the more ambitious products to emerge from African marketing technology. As COO of Terragon — a Lagos-headquartered data business with operations in Kenya, South Africa, Ghana and India — she led the build and launch of what the company calls the continent’s first Communications Platform as a Service fully integrated with a Customer Data Platform. The premise is simple to state and hard to execute: give a bank a single system that unifies what it knows about each customer and lets it reach that customer, across channels, with messaging tuned to behaviour.
The commercial proof came quickly. Within the first year, two banks alone were generating more than one million dollars in monthly recurring revenue through the platform; where it was deployed, customer-satisfaction scores rose 42 percent and churn fell 34 percent. The system now serves more than 50 million consumers, and Terragon has become the first and only African company certified by the global Customer Data Platform Institute.
What distinguishes Ukadike, colleagues say, is range. “Her leadership was critical in bridging engineering and commercial strategy,” says Livingstone Odero, Chief of Staff to Terragon’s chief executive. The company’s Chief Technology Officer, Ayodeji Balogun, places her among the top one percent of professionals in her field. Within Terragon she is known, only half in jest, as the “Chief Executor” — the person who turns strategy into shipped product. She was recruited as Vice President of People and Culture and promoted to Chief Operating Officer within a year.
The NiTA recognition, awarded on 9 December at a ceremony in Victoria Island, Lagos, is not a popularity prize. The programme, run since 2015, bars self-nomination, verifies every entry independently, and puts nominees before a nine-person judging panel before any award is made. Ukadike was the only individual named in the new category — an acknowledgement not merely of what she has built, but of a sustained effort to widen the field for women. She has moderated technology segments at Doing Business in Nigeria, chaired sessions at different tech events, and mentors through the WIMBIZ network.
For Ukadike, the throughline is proving that world-class engineering and commercial discipline can be built on African soil for African markets. “The data was always there,” she has said of the continent’s banks. “What was missing was a way to turn it into something the customer actually values.” On Terragon’s numbers, that translation is well underway.
The company has raised around 14 million dollars and is among the African data businesses most closely watched by international investors. For its Chief Operating Officer, the 2023 award is one more signal that the operators building Africa’s digital economy are increasingly recognised — at home and abroad — as figures of genuine continental significance.
