There is something that becomes clear when you look closely at Eyewuene Murphy-Akpieyi’s journey: she has never been comfortable simply accepting that things are the way they are.
For her, there has always been a desire to understand what is not working, why it is not working, and what can be done differently. At the heart of it is a simple belief, things can improve. You can see it in the lawyer who wanted people to understand their rights, in the young leader who was drawn to questions of people, opportunity and social change, in the professional who moved into governance and compliance, and today, in the work she does around governance, anti-corruption, asset recovery and institutional development across Africa.
What has changed over the years is not the desire to make a difference, but the scale at which she is doing it. Eyewuene’s journey has taken her from helping individuals navigate systems to working on the systems themselves. And that, perhaps, is the most interesting way to understand her career. She is not simply a lawyer who has moved through a series of impressive roles; she is a governance and institutional development professional whose work has increasingly focused on a bigger question: how do we build institutions and systems that actually work for the people they are meant to serve?
That question has roots in her earliest experiences with leadership and service. Long before governance became the language of her professional career, Eyewuene was already putting herself in spaces where young people were being challenged to lead, serve and think about the society around them. At the University of Lagos, she became President of AIESEC in Lagos, a student-led organisation focused on leadership development and creating opportunities for young people. In that role, she was already working at the intersection of people, leadership and change. Her public conversations at the time reflected a concern about the aspirations of Nigerian young people and the need for better opportunities and stronger leadership.
Her participation in the Carrington Youth Fellowship Initiative, a leadership programme of the U.S. Consulate in Lagos, added another dimension to that early journey. As a 2014 fellow, she was part of a cohort focused on leadership and community development, while her professional profile describes the experience as helping her apply her academic knowledge to real-world projects and develop skills in good governance, people management and team building.
The more I looked at these earlier chapters of Eyewuene’s journey, the more difficult it became to see them as simply a collection of leadership experiences. AIESEC, the Carrington fellowship, her work around legal awareness and human rights, were all pointing in a similar direction, even before there was a clear professional title for it. Leadership, service, justice and the desire to improve things were already beginning to sit together.
But she would come to discover that practising law was only one way to contribute.
Early in her career, she became particularly interested in access to justice and legal awareness. Through Legal Awareness Nigeria, she worked to help people in underserved communities understand their rights and navigate the legal system. The work took her beyond the traditional boundaries of legal practice, involving community engagement, work with young people and women, partnerships with NGOs and government agencies, and the coordination of legal professionals and community paralegals. Her professional profile records a statewide legal awareness campaign that reached more than 50 beneficiaries, alongside legal rights programmes for women and girls and a network of more than 50 legal professionals.
What I found particularly interesting when I looked back at this part of her journey was that the scale of the work was not yet what it is today, but the instinct was already there. She was not simply responding to individual problems. She was looking at what could be changed around the problem, how people could be better informed, how others could be equipped to help, and how structures could be created to make the work continue.
That same instinct continued to shape her career. Her years in legal practice exposed her to corporate governance, regulatory compliance, commercial agreements, intellectual property, dispute resolution and the complexities of helping organisations operate within increasingly demanding regulatory environments. She worked with multinational companies and led complex governance and compliance projects, developed systems for monitoring regulatory changes, supported corporate governance audits and advised clients on investment, trade and regulatory matters.
At this point in her career, the direction becomes easier to see. The work was becoming less about law as an isolated discipline and more about the systems surrounding it: how organisations remain accountable, how policies translate into practice, how institutions manage risk and how processes can be created to work beyond the individual people responsible for them.
Those questions eventually took her into a broader field.
Today, Eyewuene works with the African Union Advisory Board against Corruption, where her work sits within some of the most important governance and accountability conversations on the continent. Her responsibilities have included working on governance and policy instruments with AU Member States, supporting regional work on anti-corruption and illicit financial flows, coordinating stakeholder consultations and contributing to efforts around asset recovery. She has also served as a focal person for the G20 anti-corruption working group and African Development Bank meetings relating to governance, illicit financial flows and anti-corruption.
This is where the story becomes particularly interesting to me. The young leader who was once working with other young Nigerians around leadership and social change is now working within African institutions on mechanisms that require cooperation between governments and organisations across borders. On paper, the two worlds could look very different. But when you follow the thread, they make a lot of sense.
The scale is different. The vocabulary is different. The stakes are different. But the underlying question is remarkably familiar: how do we make the system work better?
One example is her work on the Common African Position on Asset Recovery reporting tool. According to her professional profile, she led its development and advocacy, contributing to a reported 45 percent improvement in African Union Member State’s awareness and drive to ensure implementation. She has also facilitated capacity-building workshops that trained more than 300 officials on asset recovery, illicit financial flows and anti-corruption mechanisms.
This is the less visible side of governance work. A policy may exist on paper, but people need to understand it; institutions need the capacity to implement it; countries need mechanisms for reporting and cooperation; stakeholders need to work together; and systems need to be monitored and strengthened. That is where Eyewuene’s experience has increasingly positioned her, in the space between policy and practice.
And the more you look at her work, the more that distinction matters. There is a tendency to talk about governance in terms of policies, laws and institutions, but institutions are ultimately made up of people and processes. Someone has to translate the policy into action, build the capacity to implement it, create the mechanisms for accountability and keep the system moving when the work becomes complicated.
Perhaps this is why institutional development has become such a natural extension of her work. Strong institutions are not created simply by writing good policies. They are built through people, systems, accountability and the capacity to consistently do the work. Her career has given her experience on different sides of that equation: she has worked with individuals trying to understand the law, inside legal and corporate environments, with organisations navigating governance and compliance, and now at a regional level, contributing to efforts to strengthen accountability and institutional responses to corruption.
The journey is therefore bigger than a list of professional positions. It is a gradual expansion of the question she has been trying to answer. At first, it was about helping people understand the systems that affected them. Then it became about helping organisations work within those systems. Now, increasingly, it is about helping strengthen the systems themselves.
That is what stayed with me most as I looked across her journey. Her career has not simply grown in seniority; it has grown in scope. The young people she once worked with became communities, the communities became organisations, the organisations became institutions, and the institutions became regional systems. Through each transition, the underlying concern remained: what can be done to make things better?
Today, Eyewuene Murphy-Akpieyi stands at the intersection of law, governance, policy, accountability and institutional development. But perhaps the title that matters most is not the one attached to her current role. It is the role she has been building towards all along: someone committed to understanding systems, questioning what does not work, and contributing to the work of making them stronger.
Because for someone who believes that things can improve, there is always another system to understand, another gap to close and another institution to strengthen.
And perhaps that is what makes Eyewuene’s story worth following. Not simply because of where her career has taken her, but because of the consistency underneath it all. The work has grown, the rooms have changed, and the scale has expanded, but the instinct remains the same: to see what can be better, and then do the work of making it better.
