Ruby Igwe’s career has had pivots. She wouldn’t change a thing.

If you were allowed to change one thing about your life’s journey, you may be tempted to alter its course and pull at a few threads—erase a wrong decision here, or fast-forward through a difficult season there. 

Ruby Igwe, the Regional Director for West and Central Africa at ALX Africa, a tech-enabled career accelerator, explicitly says she would not change a thing.

“Everything I’ve done has gotten me to where I am,” she says. “I think it would be remiss to change anything, because I really am happy where I have gotten to.”

In 2009, she started undertaking internships while still in secondary school. Before Igwe would go on to study Law at the University of Kent, she was already sitting inside law firms, trying to understand what the legal profession actually demanded of people. 

“I’ve always liked to be thorough,” she explains. “So, if I was going to do something and make it my career, I wanted to understand it.”

Even after leaving Nigeria in 2011 to continue her A-Levels in England, Igwe returned to Lagos during her summer holidays to intern. In 2011, she interned at Efere Ozako & Associates, a law firm, and at StreamSowers and Köhn the following year.

“Working and interning at law firms taught me structure,” Igwe says, noting that these early professional years formed a blueprint for her. 

In 2013, she gained admission to study Law at the University of Kent, a public research university in England. The internships continued until she finished her degree. 

“Studying law taught me structure, critical thinking, and logic,” she says. It was a skill set that would prove quietly indispensable in every role that followed. 

Homecoming and media 

Igwe completed her Bachelor of Laws (LLB) degree in July 2016 and returned to Nigeria in the same year. She had never intended to stay in England, she says. 

“I wasn’t planning to live or practice there,” she says. 

The decision had also been shaped by loss.  Her mother had passed away earlier in April 2014, during her first year at university.

“If she hadn’t passed on, I probably may not have gone back to Nigeria as early as I [did],” she says.

She had two plans in Nigeria: complete her professional training at the Nigerian Law School in Abuja, and also complete the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC), the mandatory one-year government program for  Nigerian graduates. She completed both.

Upon completing national service in December 2017, an opportunity came. And she took it. She began working in Lagos-based Smat Media Productions as the production office secretary of the sixth season of MTV Shuga, a television drama series aimed at raising sexual health awareness. 

“I liked what I was doing,” she says about Law, “but at the same time I felt like I would like other things. Which is why when the opportunity came to work on MTV Shuga, I jumped at it.” 

While still working on the show, she joined Pinpoint Media Services Group, a Lagos-based media organisation, as an operations specialist in December 2017, running both roles concurrently before she resigned from Smat Media in 2018. 

At Pinpoint Media, she was later promoted to Head of Operations by December 2019—a role she held until March 2021.

In those four years, Igwe worked closely with the company’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Chris Ihidero, and learned to drive creative projects toward “commercial outcomes” under real constraints. 

“You have a production budget,” she recalls. “You also have human resources — production staff — whose time, energy, and schedules you have to manage to get the content that makes the entire production worthwhile.”

She was, without quite naming it yet, becoming versed in operations. 

While managing operations at Pinpoint, she began moonlighting as an adjunct lecturer at the Lagos-based Centre for Law and Business (CLB), an academic institution, teaching the University of London’s English Legal Systems LLB Law course.

In December 2019, she co-founded Archivi.ng, an initiative dedicated to digitising old Nigerian newspapers. 

A taste for something bigger

Then came the  COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, but Igwe found a way to still work. She says she spent the latter half of 2020 freelancing with a repatriation flight initiative under the Presidential Task Force on COVID-19 in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city, coordinating with agencies such as the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) and the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP). 

The scale involved in managing logistics during the pandemic did something to her appetite,  and “catalysed” her transition into a tech-adjacent sector. 

“I got a ‘taste for blood’,” she says, “or a different taste for operations. Then I started to look for other similar things.” 

What she found was ALX Africa. In February 2021, she enrolled in ALX’s Pathfinder Academy, an internal training programme she likens to banking school—except instead of teaching you how a bank works, it teaches you how to guide people along career paths. She says at the time, ALX had over 50 pathfinders who were guiding 150 community members each. She held her community members accountable, supported them, and assisted in figuring out what came next in their careers. 

“The idea was to speak to them and guide them on their path,” she says.

After completing the Academy, Igwe transitioned into a formal role at ALX in April 2021. 

“There was a lot of human resource and financial management that translated into my work at ALX,” she says. “I think [that] made it easy to transition post-Pathfinder, [and] to all the other roles I took that led me to where I am now.”

Transitioning did not come without its challenges. At a 2023 activation event at Yaba College of Technology (YabaTech), a higher educational institution in Lagos, she recalls that her team expected a few hundred attendees. 

What they experienced, however, was a crowd that overwhelmed the venue, scarcity of fans, and one of the food vendors arriving late.

“These are small things when you’re dealing with fewer people”, she says. “You don’t think about it, because it doesn’t come up. But as you deal with more people, things start to break.”

If ALX expanded her operational instincts, it also gave her somewhere unexpected to deploy the ones she already had: her legal grounding proved useful. Rather than routing every contract through the legal team, Igwe says she drafts Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs)—formal agreements that outline the terms of a partnership between two parties—before a binding contract is signed. 

“After drafting, she sends them to the legal team for final review. She says doing this prevents her from being ‘rusty’.

“I like doing my best to give them [ALX’s legal team] as little work as possible, because I’m a lawyer,” she says. “ I feel like it’s the least I can do.” 

She says she still pays her Bar Practising Fees, a statutory annual fee paid by all legal practitioners in Nigeria.

“I don’t particularly know how I want to be a lawyer, but at some point I might want to think about utilising my law degree in some other way,” she notes.

The answer, for now, can wait. But one thing is already settled: she will not be standing still in her career while she figures it out. 

A toolkit 

“I am always learning, always figuring out new things,” Igwe admits.

Since joining ALX Africa, she says she has consistently evaluated her technical gaps to ensure she thoroughly understands the digital products and career tracks her organisation offers to young Africans.

In June 2025, in order to understand what ALX was selling in terms of its courses on Artificial Intelligence (AI), she started taking courses. 

“I [took] a Microsoft course. All of us at the organisation [took] an ALX course,” she says. “Now I’m thinking more about data. I already make data-driven decisions, but [I ask] ‘do I want to go a bit more into data analysis?’ ”

She believes that a leader should understand the mechanics of the market they operate in.

“Every half year, I am evaluating and figuring out what to add to my toolkit,” she says. “Don’t stay static.” 

In December 2025, she concluded her adjunct lecturing at CLB, closing out nearly eight years of teaching that had run alongside everything else — the media work, the pandemic, and the ALX transition.

In that same month, Igwe was promoted to the position of Regional Director for West and Central Africa at ALX Africa, transitioning from her previous role as Country Director, Nigeria. 

Based in Lagos, Nigeria, the regional position has shifted her responsibilities far beyond pure operations management, requiring her to oversee regional Profit and Loss (P&L) statements, drive corporate business development, and handle high-level public sector stakeholder relations across multiple countries. 

“There’s a lot to grow into [and] explore [while] expanding across Africa,” Igwe reflects.

The intense workload that comes with the new role fits her self-proclaimed work-oriented personality.

“I really like working; that’s a lot of what I do. I work on weekends [and] on public holidays,” she says. “I really enjoy my work.”

Beginning in September 2026, she plans to embark on an intense academic journey. 

“This is my last year of no school,” she says. “I’m probably going to have eight or ten years of school, which sucks, but it’s what I want.” 

Igwe plans to pursue three distinct Master’s degrees—including a Master’s in Management and a Master of Business Administration (MBA)—and a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Management, all while maintaining her role at ALX. 

She also plans to write a book. “It’s non-fiction, so it’s probably going to be about management. [I have] at least three books planned about management,” she reveals.

Igwe loves to read, and mentions Daniel Pink, an American writer, and Terry Hayes, an Australian writer, as current favourites. 

“I would read almost anything, so it’s really hard to have favourites,” she says.

When she is not reading, writing, or working, she enjoys Salsa dancing.