Tunde Olugboji

“The program opened a few doors for me… it came at the right time in my career.”

Looking back on his experience in HRAP in 1997, Tunde Olugboji recalls making good use of the networking opportunities offered through the program. During HRAP, Olugboji was working with the Constitutional Rights Project, an NGO devoted to ensuring that legislation relating to the rights of citizens in Nigeria complies with international human rights standards. His participation in the program connected him with donors that would become important to his future work.

In fact, it was during this experience that he met his “wonderful mentor, Paul Martin,” who at the time served as executive director at the Center for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University. Martin’s course was also one of the few that Olugboji  had the opportunity to audit, including a Law School lecture by Michael Posner and a seminar with the highly regarded father of human rights law, Louis Henkin. Attending these courses provided Olugboji with a new set of skills that aided him both immediately after the program and throughout his career.

Olugboji went on to complete further training programs in Denmark, empowering him to co-establish Nigeria’s first free expression group: Centre for Free Speech.Olugboji ’s unyielding passion for human rights advocacy led him to continue taking on larger projects, and today he serves as Deputy Program Director at Human Rights Watch (HRW), a multinational NGO. He currently oversees several programs including the HRW arm in Africa–which is HRW’s largest program–Health and Human Rights, Disability Rights, and Business and Human Rights. His aim to create a new sub-program focusing on environmental human rights. When Olugboji is not devoting his time to advocating for international rights, he shares his valuable insights from years of experience as an adjunct professor at Hunter College in New York.

Written by Gabrielle Isabelle Hernaiz-De Jesus in 2016.