Crisis is nothing new for Cecilia Ibru: as the managing director and CEO of Nigeria’s Oceanic Bank International, she has dealt with the challenges arising from the present global recession in the context of Nigeria’s efforts at tackling issues—poverty, civil unrest, and corruption—that have kept roughly 70 percent of the country’s population below the poverty line. “Banking is about people,” she says, but when the people you serve are among the world’s poorest, that philosophy must meet the challenge of investing in men and women whose promise and value have long gone unrealized.
Yet that is precisely Ibru’s strategy. Since the founding of Oceanic, in 1990, the bank has supported economic development through public–private partnerships that invest in local businesses—and, as a result, has grown from a modest family-owned bank into one of Nigeria’s largest publicly quoted institutions. Ibru’s March 2009 appointment to the board of the United Nations Global Compact, a corporate-citizenship initiative chaired by the UN’s secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, solidified her reputation as a champion of corporate responsibility in a region long beset by corruption.