AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT

Taiwo Taiwo

Chief Mrs. Taiwo Taiwo is the Chairman, Lexham Investment (owners of Shonny Investment Property Company (SIPC)). She has over forty-five years of experience in the real estate industry as a developer both in Nigeria and internationally, covering the commercial and residential markets. At age 28, she was appointed Director of Operations at Shonny Investment and Properties Co. Limited and was given the responsibility of arranging the financing of the Elephant House project, an 18-storey development on Broad Street, Lagos. She had direct responsibility for coordinating the finance, and financing of the project, as well as paying back the bridge and debenture loans which she completed making Shonny Investment & Properties Company Limited the first company to have discharged its obligation as and when due in the history of the Nigeria capital marketing. She was 32 years. Taiwo Taiwo is the founding and current Chairman of the acclaimed secondary school, Atlantic Hall, a co-educational non-profit secondary school. She is the founding Chairman and Trustee of Lagos Millennium Group on the Environment—a non-profit pressure group of business leaders, stakeholders, and concerned citizens of Lagos, working to arrest the deterioration of the infrastructure of Lagos, improve the environment, and make Lagos the ‘Venice of Africa’. Under her leadership, an ultra-modern fire station, ‘the Ajele Fire Station’—with funds donated by Shell—was built, equipped to the highest standard in the world, and donated to the Lagos State Government for the benefit of the Lagos Island community. Chief Mrs. Taiwo Taiwo is a committed social entrepreneur. Over the years, she has sat on the board of Fate Foundation as a founding member. She sits on the board of the Chike Okoli Foundation. In August 2002, following the death of her 24-year-old daughter four months earlier, she founded the Aart of Life Foundation, inspired by the life of her daughter, Abioye Aronke Taiwo, and an acronym of her name. The Foundation is established to promote and advance the virtues of love, compassion, charity, and beauty, amongst all Nigerians. The foundation has pioneered grief and trauma counselling in Nigeria, working with multiple local and international organisations, and has recently partnered with the Lagos State Government to train carefully selected graduates for a 24-hour call centre pilot scheme, with counsellors on hand. On the 17th of July, 2019, Taiwo Taiwo was awarded an honorary award by the Chartered Institute of Public Resources Management & Politics in Ghana, for her outstanding trailblazing entrepreneurship achievement in Africa.