Temidire Alesh
Class of 2022
Temidire was born in the US to Nigerian parents and grew up in Benin. She is a Gender Activist with over five years of International Development experience in West Africa. Her interest in Development was forged after two International Health service trips to Morocco and Guatemala as an Undergraduate Neuroscience student in Boston. These trips allowed her to draw connections between development issues facing those countries and her native Nigeria. Upon graduating, she moved to Lagos to work at Special Olympics Nigeria as a Program & Fundraising Coordinator. She subsequently joined the Peace Corps in Togo as a Community Health Volunteer, and through her work with women and girls on maternal and adolescent health projects, she developed a passion for gender inequality. After two years of grassroots-level work with Peace Corps, Temidire moved on to a policy-level role at the Lagos State Ministry of Health in Nigeria, working with the Health Financing Team to design the first state-wide social health insurance scheme. A year later, she joined the PharmAccess Foundation, a healthcare nonprofit supporting African governments on health systems strengthening initiatives. While in Lagos, Temidire also helped create a social enterprise called NESA By Makers which trains young Nigerians on new economy tech-skills and places them in employment.
At GHD, her focus will be on exploring gender-lens economic policies and social innovation as means to promoting economic and leadership opportunities for women and girls across Africa, which is her ultimate life mission.