Over the last 16 years, Tosin Ishola has built a career that refuses to fit neatly into one box.
Her work has taken her from international development and nonprofit leadership to healthcare technology and entrepreneurship. She has built a nonprofit that has reached more than 15,000 people, joined the work of making health insurance more accessible to Nigerians, and built businesses around interiors, specialised cleaning and her interests in fashion and culture.
But what makes her journey worth paying attention to is not simply the number of things she has done. It is the range of spaces in which she has chosen to build, and the fact that, across all of them, she keeps finding ways to turn knowledge, experience and ideas into something useful.
Her professional journey has taken her through international development, nonprofit management, project management, business development, health technology and entrepreneurship. Today, she is the Founder and Program Director of Together for Needs Initiative, the COO and Co-Founder of Lafiami Health, and an entrepreneur behind businesses including Curtains and Spread and Curtain Edge Cleanings. Each reflects a different part of her: her commitment to people and communities experiencing poverty and inequality, her interest in healthcare and technology, and her entrepreneurial and creative side.
And the more you look at her work, the easier it becomes to see that these are not random chapters. They are different expressions of a woman who has spent years learning, building and finding practical ways to respond to needs around her.
Tosin’s academic journey provides an important foundation for the work she has gone on to do. She studied International Relations at Covenant University, Nigeria, before earning a Master’s degree in International Development, Poverty, Inequality and Development from the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. Her postgraduate training deepened her understanding of the structural causes of poverty and inequality, as well as the policies, systems and interventions that can contribute to more inclusive and sustainable development outcomes.
But for Tosin, development has never been something to understand only from a classroom or policy document. Over the years, her professional experience has taken her into community development, programme design and implementation, beneficiary profiling, stakeholder engagement, resource mobilisation, project management, impact measurement and nonprofit leadership. This combination of academic knowledge and practical experience has shaped the way she approaches her work.
One of the clearest expressions of that approach is Together for Needs Initiative, which Tosin founded around the issues of poverty reduction, social protection and inequality, with a focus on people who are often excluded from social and economic opportunities. Since its inception, the organisation has reached more than 15,000 beneficiaries.
Its work spans education, economic empowerment, food security, menstrual health, sexual and reproductive health, women’s empowerment and community development. These include education grants and scholarships, seed capital and economic empowerment support, food aid, menstrual health interventions and pad drives, sexual and reproductive health awareness, back-to-school initiatives, skills acquisition, women’s empowerment programmes and community outreaches, including Together for Needs Initiative’s Christmas outreach programmes.
The beneficiaries reflect the breadth of this work: widows, orphans and vulnerable children, persons with disabilities, women and single mothers, elderly people and other economically disadvantaged members of underserved communities.
And when you look at the people Together for Needs Initiative serves, you begin to understand why the work goes beyond simply putting programmes together.
What is particularly striking about Together for Needs Initiative’s work is that it does not treat vulnerability as a single issue. People’s lives are complicated. A family facing poverty may also be dealing with healthcare costs. A woman may need economic support while navigating other barriers. A girl may need menstrual health support while also needing to remain in school and have access to accurate information and a safe environment.
This is where Tosin’s development experience becomes particularly valuable. Her work requires her to consider both the immediate need and what could create a longer-term opportunity. It is not simply about asking, What can we give this person? but what kind of support, opportunity or intervention can genuinely make a difference in that person’s life.
And that same question seems to follow Tosin into another important part of her work.
Tosin is also the COO and Co-Founder of Lafiami Health, a health-tech company focused on making affordable health insurance more accessible to Nigerians.
Healthcare is one of those areas where inequality can become particularly difficult to ignore. Cost, information, understanding insurance products and even knowing where to begin can all become barriers to accessing care.
Lafiami is working to simplify that experience. Through technology and partnerships with health insurance providers, the company is focused on helping Nigerians find, understand and access affordable health insurance.
For Tosin, this represents another way of thinking about impact. Her work with Together for Needs Initiative involves responding directly to the needs of people experiencing vulnerability, while Lafiami takes her into a space where technology and enterprise can help people access a system designed to provide financial protection when healthcare is needed.
The model may be different, but the underlying concern remains familiar: how do we make essential services more accessible?
Then there is another side of Tosin that I think is important to the story.
Outside her work in development and health technology, Tosin leads Curtains and Spread, an interior-focused business specialising in bespoke window treatments, including curtains and blinds, as well as bedding and soft furnishings. Her interest in interiors has grown beyond simply providing products to include interior styling and creating spaces that are beautiful, functional and thoughtfully put together.
She also identified an opportunity within the same broader market through Curtain Edge Cleanings, a specialised cleaning company providing professional cleaning solutions for curtains, carpets and upholstery. The business was created to serve an underserved niche within the home and commercial interiors market, with an ambition to become a preferred professional service provider for curtain, carpet and upholstery care.
Tosin also has interests and ventures within the fashion and cultural space. Over a decade ago, she founded Kulturall NG, a fashion and lifestyle brand rooted in promoting African culture through contemporary design. The brand creates Afrocentric pieces, travel wear and branded merchandise, incorporating indigenous textiles and techniques such as Adire and Batik, while bringing together fashion, art, design and cultural expression in ways that make African heritage relevant to modern, everyday life.
And I think this entrepreneurial side of Tosin is important because it gives us a fuller picture of who she is.
She is not simply a social impact professional who happens to run businesses; she is an entrepreneur in her own right. She understands markets, identifies opportunities, pays attention to customer needs and is willing to build in spaces where she sees room for something better.
That entrepreneurial instinct also enriches her social impact work, giving her a practical understanding of enterprise, innovation and the realities of building solutions that are both meaningful and sustainable.
There is often an assumption that social impact and business exist on opposite sides of a divide. Tosin’s career challenges that idea.
Her experience shows that there are different ways to solve problems. A nonprofit can provide direct support to someone who needs it. A business can create an income opportunity or provide a service. Technology can make an essential system easier to navigate. Partnerships can extend the reach of an intervention. Innovation can make it possible to approach an old problem differently.
And sometimes, one person can work across all of these spaces.
That multidisciplinary approach has become a defining feature of Tosin’s career. Her work has given her experience in programme design and implementation, community development, beneficiary profiling, stakeholder engagement, resource mobilisation, project management, impact measurement and nonprofit leadership. It has also brought her into conversations around healthcare, disability inclusion, entrepreneurship, technology and access.
These are not disconnected interests. They sit within a broader understanding of what it takes for people to participate fully in society and have access to the resources and opportunities they need to thrive.
And that matters, especially in a world where women are often encouraged to find one thing they are good at and build their entire identity around it. Tosin’s career suggests another possibility: that you can build expertise in one area and still explore another; that skills developed in one sector can become useful somewhere completely different; and that purpose does not have to look exactly the same in every chapter of your life.
For Tosin, the development sector may have been an important starting point, but it has never been the boundary of her ambition.
It would be easy to tell Tosin’s story through numbers: more than 16 years of professional experience, more than 15,000 beneficiaries of Together for Needs Initiative, multiple organisations and businesses, two university degrees, including a Master’s degree from the University of Birmingham, and years of programme management, stakeholder engagement, resource mobilisation and nonprofit leadership.
Those numbers matter. They show the scale and consistency of the work. But they do not tell the whole story.
Behind the 15,000 beneficiaries are people: a child who received educational support; a woman who received an opportunity to strengthen her livelihood; a family that received food assistance; a girl who received menstrual health support; a person living with disability who was included in a programme; a Nigerian who may now have an easier path to finding health insurance; and a customer who found a specialised service they needed.
That is what makes the different pieces of Tosin’s work worth looking at together. They are all, in different ways, about people being able to access something they need.
Tosin Ishola’s professional journey is not the story of someone who chose one lane and stayed in it. It is the story of a woman who has built expertise, gained experience and continued to ask what else she could do with it.
She has worked in international development. She has founded and grown a nonprofit. She has worked directly with vulnerable populations. She has entered health technology, explored healthcare access, built businesses and pursued her creative interests.
And honestly, there is a lot to admire in that, not simply because Tosin does many things, but because she has managed to bring purpose, experience, enterprise and creativity into the same professional life.
Her story is a reminder that impact does not always arrive in one familiar shape. Sometimes it is a nonprofit programme. Sometimes it is a technology platform. Sometimes it is a business. Sometimes it is a service. And sometimes it is simply a woman deciding that she has more to offer than one title can contain.
For Tosin Ishola, more than 16 years into her journey, there is already a substantial body of work behind her.
And perhaps the most exciting part is that she is still giving herself permission to explore what comes next.
