Tara Adefope

Ms. Tara Adefope is the Director General, Bureau of Public Procurement (BPP), Oyo State. In this capacity, she is tasked with ensuring adherence to “Due Process” across the State with a view to fostering a culture of integrity, accountability and competitiveness in the procurement process.

Leading a team of professionals, she oversees strategic initiatives for the implementation, training, development and optimisation of due process within the State. In this regard, she adopts best practice to improve the capacity of Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDA’s), as it pertains to the procurement process and contract awards. These measures have also contributed to the seamless implementation and tracking of budgetary allocations within the State.

She has worked to ensure the State remains a pioneer in streamlining the procurement process and implementation in line with local, state and federal laws and regulations particularly with the introduction of a robust set of guidelines which includes the revision of thresholds for the award of contracts in order to optimize the capacity of awarding authorities and ensure transparency in the bidding and contracting process. She has also worked to digitise the procurement process within the State with the introduction of e-vendor registration and e-procurement platforms in a bid to ensure a greater measure of efficiency and transparency within the State’s procurement process.

Prior to her appointment as the Director General, Bureau of Public Procurement, she held prominent positions within the Governance, Regulatory and Compliance field, spanning the public and private sector.

She began her career in a Governance Advisory firm in the United Kingdom and subsequently held similar roles in other organisations specializing in Corporate Governance, Risk Management and Regulatory Compliance.

A strong proponent of international and economic development, she was keen to return to Nigeria to leverage her expertise in the field where her career progressed within the private sector. In Banking, she worked in Compliance, Regulatory Risk Management, Anti Money Laundering (AML) and Corporate Governance where her experience in the sector fuelled her passion for development finance and the need to bridge public/private partnerships. This led her to a role within the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank Group on the Africa Corporate Governance Program, where she led the Corporate Governance activities in Nigeria and Ghana with a focus on providing Corporate Governance interventions, foreign direct investments to companies, regulators, and market intermediaries.

Ms. Adefope is passionate about nation building, and a strong advocate for good governance, ethics and positive value systems across every strata of society. She is an avid reader and travel enthusiast.

She holds an LLB Law (Hons.) degree and an MSc in Corporate Governance & Business Ethics.