Unwana Efiong Esang is a respected strategy design expert, a vastly experienced strategy execution practitioner, a tested corporate transformation professional and a certified people & organizational change management executive with over 20 years’ cognate experience in enterprise-wide strategy development, transformation management and execution, strategic programme and project planning, post-acquisition merger and integration, enterprise risk assessment and management, business execution performance monitoring and reporting, business process re-engineering, business intelligence and data analytics, corporate governance, business development, client relationship management, sales and post-merger integration.
He has established a proven track-record in cross-functional, multi-cultural and multi-lingual team leadership across Sub- Saharan Africa. Adept at forging relationships with strategic partners and in building consensus vertically and horizontally
across multiple organizational levels, Unwana is a strategic thought-leader, consistent and proven performer, effective communicator, a catalyst for organizational growth and an effective link between the C-Suite and the organization.
Unwana has garnered experience and contacts across several countries in Sub-Saharan Africa while working at executive management levels at a $27bn pan-African bank with a presence in over 30 countries and across four (4) languages. He has participated in or led several investment cases and projects which have mobilized finance in excess of $12bn into several ventures at regional, national and sub-national levels across Africa.
He holds a bachelor’s degree in accounting from the University of Calabar and a master’s degree in finance and management from Loughborough University in the United Kingdom. He is currently a member of the Financial Markets and Financial Inclusion Policy Commission of the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG), the foremost economic thinktank in Nigeria and also is a member of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Sub-Committee on Financial Inclusion for Women.
Unwana is a Fellow of the Institute of Strategic Management Nigeria (ISMN) and an Associate Member of the Institute of Directors Nigeria (IoD). He is a member of the Risk Management Institute of Nigeria, certified by the Chartered Institute of Bankers of Nigeria (CIBN) as a microfinance practitioner, a member of the Agile Practitioners Association of Nigeria, a member of the Project Management Institute (PMI), a member of the International Institute for Business Analysis (IIBA) and is certified by ICAgile as an Agile Project and Delivery Management professional as well as being a Prince2 certified project manager.
Furthermore, Unwana has worked alongside best-practice strategy consulting firms such as McKinsey & Co., Bain & Co., PwC, KPMG and Oliver Wyman on several strategy design & execution, corporate transformation and change management programmes in Nigeria and Sub- Saharan Africa. He is an avid golfer, tennis player, football player and Formula 1 fan.
