By Isqil Najim

The elevation to the rank of Professor of Chemical Engineering is an academic milestone. From one of three women in her engineering class to the only candidate in her Department to scale through the most recent professorial promotion exercise — four decades at one institution, and still building, this is the story of rise and rise of Engr Prof. Elizabeth Jumoke Eterigho, FNSE, FNSchE, the professor of Chemical Engineering.

There is a particular kind of courage required of a young woman who decides, in Nigeria in the 1980s, that she will become an engineer — not merely to enter the profession, but to become one of its very best, to carry that ambition across decades and through every resistance in her path, and to arrive, many years later, as a Full Professor, a national association president, and a pioneer who has left the door open behind her for every woman who comes after.

That woman is Professor Elizabeth Jumoke Eterigho, FNSE, FNSChE — and the Federal University of Technology, Minna has now confirmed, formally and finally, what those who have worked beside her have long known.

Professor Eterigho was born in Lagos and grew up in motion, as the child of a family that moved with Nigeria’s restless rhythms. Her Primary school education began at Reagan Memorial Baptist School in Onike, Yaba, and ended at Army Children Primary School in Sokoto. Secondary education followed at Federal Government College, Sokoto, where she completed her studies in 1983. Through all that movement, the constant was science and her tenacious, restless attraction to how things work and why.

Her first ambition, on leaving school, was medicine. But in 1985 she was admitted to the Federal University of Technology, Minna, to study Chemical Engineering, and the redirection proved, in retrospect, to be precisely where she was always meant to go.

In 1991, she graduated with a Second Class Upper degree, one of only three women in her class — all three of whom outperformed the majority of their male counterparts. The gender imbalance she witnessed in that lecture hall would fuel the next three decades of her life.

After a year of National Youth Service at the Bauchi State Water Board, FUT Minna offered her a lecturing position immediately upon her return. This was a reflection of how exceptional a student she had been. She joined the Department of Chemical Engineering as an Assistant Lecturer in 1993 and has not left but has grown in leap and leaving legacies behind her tracks.

Over the years that followed, she pursued advanced qualifications with the same disciplined hunger that had marked her undergraduate years. Two Master’s degrees came first, both from FUT Minna: one in Mechanical Engineering with an industrial and production option in 2000, another in Chemical Engineering specialising in petroleum and petrochemicals in 2002. Then, in 2008, she went further, this time, travelling to the United Kingdom and enrolling concurrently in two programmes at Newcastle University, one of Britain’s foremost research institutions.

She completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education in 2010, and in 2012, a doctorate in Chemical Engineering specialising in Biofuel and Catalysis. At the 2010 catalyst preparation conference in the United Kingdom, she was awarded the prize for second-best postgraduate presenter — recognised among researchers from across Britain and beyond.

“I love challenges. I love occupying spaces that have traditionally excluded women.”— Prof. Elizabeth Jumoke Eterigho, FNSE, FNSChE

A Career That Refuses to Stay in One Lane

Back at FUT Minna, Eterigho built a research programme of rare breadth and national relevance — converting agricultural waste into biofuel, producing hydrogen through steam reforming of bioethanol, characterising lignocellulosic biomass in Nigerian communities as potential fuel sources, and developing thermodynamic models for renewable energy systems.

Over seventy-six research papers, published in local and international journals, mark the footprint of that work. Research grants from PTDF, the FUT Senate, and TETFUND funded it. Hundreds of undergraduate and postgraduate students were supervised through it. But the laboratory was never where her ambitions ended.

She became a member of the Nigerian Society of Engineers in 2000 and of the Nigerian Society of Chemical Engineers in 2001, eventually earning fellowship of both organisations.

She served on the FUT Minna Governing Council, on the board of the Niger State Sewage and Water Corporation, and on the Technical Advisory Committee of the Technology Incubation Centre in Minna.

At APWEN’s Minna chapter, which she chaired from 2016 to 2018, she launched Cisco computer training for girls aged ten to thirteen, ran interschool science competitions across public secondary schools, established a mentoring programme that continues to operate after her tenure, and collaborated with the Niger State government on girl-child education initiatives — producing a policy-facing statistical report for the state Ministry of Education at a time when most academics never venture near such work.

Then came the NSE. She served as vice-chairman of the NSE Minna Branch — only the third woman to hold that position since the branch was founded in 1989 — before making history outright in August 2019 as the first female chairman in the branch’s entire history.

“We are tearing down the stereotypes that have hindered women from embracing the engineering profession. Now that more women are going into engineering and APWEN is doing a lot to support them, we know that the future is going to be different.” — Prof. Elizabeth Jumoke Eterigho

Under her leadership, the branch organised Niger State’s first engineering conference for cross-disciplinary collaboration, launched the first virtual engineering meetings and webinars in Minna during the COVID-19 lockdown, established a branch website and set up monthly e-newsletter. It also set up a Monitoring and Supervision Committee that actively observed, and in some cases halted, substandard road and building construction across the state.

In January 2022, at the Oriental Hotel in Lagos, before an audience that included governors, the NSE President, the Chairman of Access Bank, and leaders of the national engineering community, she was sworn in as the 17th President of the Association of Professional Women Engineers of Nigeria — APWEN.

She came to that office not with a honeymoon period of ideas but with plans already drawn. Her flagship initiative, FunSTEM, reimagined science education for girls aged ten to nineteen in rural public schools, making STEM genuinely exciting rather than intimidating, and was funded through a grant from the Worley Foundation in Australia, with Eterigho as its sole principal author. Her Robotics Education initiative, sponsored by the NCDMB, took robotics training into four states in the South-South zone. Her AI empowerment project, funded by the African Technology Policy Studies Network in Nairobi, placed practical enterprise skills in the hands of ten widowed women from rural communities in Rivers and Abia States.

On the policy front, her tenure produced a diversity and inclusion framework implemented under the Federal Government, resulting in the appointment of eleven female engineers to 45 technical board positions at NASENI — the kind of structural change that outlasts any single administration.

And now she is a Professor. Within the School of Infrastructure, Process and Engineering Technology at FUT Minna, she was the only candidate to successfully scale through the most recent professorial promotion exercise — a rigorous, peer-reviewed process that many enter and few survive. The institution confirmed, in its own exacting terms, what three decades of research, teaching, and service had already established.

The young girl admitted to FUT Minna as a student in 1985 is now its Professor, shaping the institution from the inside, and sending into Nigeria’s engineering profession the next generation who will carry the work forward.

Nothing can better if a fitting tribute to her than Her own words when she said, “We are tearing down the stereotypes that have hindered women from embracing the engineering profession. The future is going to be different.”— Prof. Elizabeth Jumoke Eterigho, FNSE, FNSChE

Congratulations, Prof. Eterigho. The bridge you built has carried many people across. It will carry many more.

Isqil Najim can be reached on Linkedin HERE

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