This article is sponsored content by Aiteo Group
Aiteo Group is Nigeria’s most successful company, Africa’s most inclusive employer, and a champion of women’s equality in the workplace. It has evolved into an employer that hires and trains more women than any other company in Nigeria and maybe across the entire Continent.
This success story started in 2008, founded by Benedict Peters, currently the Executive Vice Chairman.
The energy company is headquartered in Nigeria and operates a diversified business model that includes upstream and downstream oil & gas, power generation, and EPC services, historically male-dominated industries.
The company has operations in 16 countries across Africa, making it one of the most well-respected businesses on the Continent.
At the top of this success story is a board and management team that has built a unique culture, which reflects their global ambitions. This unique company culture has also led to unprecedented success for Aiteo as it seeks to lead the way in Africa’s development and economic transformation.
Aiteo Group’s diversity leadership started with Benedict Peters, who is a Nigerian and an ethnic Ijaw. This has led to its focus on diversity and inclusion, which is embodied in its core values of respect, integrity, accountability, teamwork, and excellence.
The company believes that this focus on diversity has been one of the key drivers of their success and helps them better manage risk, innovate for sustainable growth and have a competitive edge.
The former President of Nigeria has even recognized the Group’s commitment to diversity. In 2015, Goodluck Jonathan gave Aiteo a national award for empowering Nigerian women.
The company won an award at the recent WAHO awards for ‘Driving Female Empowerment in Nigeria, at the Africa Oil and Gas Awards in Diversity & Inclusion Leadership.
“WE EMPOWER WOMEN” is the banner under which Aiteo has invested extensively across its business to support Nigerian women, both within and outside of Aiteo Group.
One of the ways Aiteo supports women is through its “Women in Oil & Gas” (WOG) initiative, which aims to empower women to play a leading role in Nigeria’s oil and gas industry. The WOG initiative provides a platform for women to share experiences, learn new skills, and network with other professionals.
Aiteo has been ranked as one of the top companies for women’s empowerment by the Women’s Empowerment Forum and Forbes in 2018. The Forbes Award recognized Mr. Peters’ “commitment to bettering the lives of people and societies across Africa by philanthropic engagement.”
Aiteo believes that diversity is a critical component to its success and is committed to empowering women across all its businesses. This commitment has increased opportunities for Nigerian women, who now account for more than 60 percent of Aiteo’s workforce.
Aiteo Group is an excellent example of how a company can successfully embrace diversity and inclusion and reap the benefits of growth, innovation, and competitiveness.
Aside from the company’s internal youth education and training programs, Aiteo is motivated to continue to invest in football. “Football is one of the areas in which we have remained committed to empowering our youth. Football is an entertaining game. Beyond that, it has the power to stimulate unity, friendship, and inclusion. The lines of ethnic, religious, and economic divisions are often blurred in the excitement of cheering our favorite teams when they play,” said Ms. Samira Buhari, Aiteo Executive, at the 2021 AITEO-NFF Awards ceremony in Lagos, Nigeria.
Most large multigenerational, multicultural companies, spread across a vast area with so many staff members, tend to have fault lines managing inclusive processes at the local level, the managerial level, but this company is focused from the bottom-up.
That’s the secret to their success. Start at the bottom, develop local-level roots and trust, and build up from there where you end with deep relationships at the top that grew together and have a personal stake in the company’s culture.
Aiteo Group set the bar for years to come and demonstrated the right way to position a company in 2021 and beyond.
