Rinsola Abiola

Rinsola Abiola is a youth and gender advocate who works at the intersection of politics and civil society to promote equitable representation for marginalized groups. Ms. Abiola is a Public Relations professional with work experience spanning over a decade in the public, private and non-profit sectors. In August 2025, she was appointed as Director General of the Citizenship and Leadership Training Centre (CLTC), a parastatal supervised by Nigeria’s Ministry of Youth Development. CLTC has the mandate of promoting civic education and value re-orientation among the youth, and providing leadership trainings to a wide array of citizens including civil servants, teens, professionals and undergraduates. Prior to this, she served as Senior Special Assistant to the President of Nigeria on Citizenship and Leadership; in this role, she worked to coordinate reform efforts geared at revitalising the CLTC. Ms. Abiola also once served as Special Assistant on Digital Media to the Speaker of the Nigerian House of Representatives. An active young politician, she is a founding member of the youth and women’s wings of Nigeria’s governing party, the All Progressives Congress (APC). In 2022, Ms. Abiola vied for the role of the APC National Youth Leader, as part of efforts to promote gender mainstreaming in youth political leadership. Within the party, she also heads the Progressive Sisters’ Network (PSN), a women’s support group for the APC with chapters across the country. In 2014, she was appointed to the party’s Board of Trustees, and was the youngest member at the time. Ms. Abiola also once served on the board of the World Youth Movement for Democracy (Africa Region) and in 2019, she was selected as a UN Women Intergenerational Mentee. She is an alumnus of the Munich Young Leaders Program, a fellowship for emerging leaders chosen from across the world; and the acclaimed International Visitors’ Leadership Program (IVLP), the United States’ foremost leadership development exchange program. She has been on other study visits to Sweden, sponsored by the Swedish Embassy, and to the United Kingdom, via the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD).