Ifeoma Uddoh

Ifeoma Hope Uddoh, or Ifeoma Nwakwesi Uddoh is a Nigerian social entrepreneur. She is founder of Shecluded, a fintech credit company aimed at women in Africa.

In December 2019 Uddoh was one of five female entrepreneurs to emerge as winners of a UK-Nigeria Tech Hub competition sponsored by the British High Commission in Lagos. The winners received sponsorship to travel to the United Kingdom for the January 2020 UK-Africa Investment Summit.

Education and early career

Uddoh studied Industrial Mathematics at the Federal University of Technology Owerri (FUTO), Nigeria. She subsequently obtained a master's degree in Management Science and Operational Research from Lancaster University, United Kingdom. She also completed an Executive MBA at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford.

Her career spans over a decade in strategy consulting, analytics and seed funding, with experience at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), IROKO Partners Limited, and Sasware, where she served as Chief Operating Officer from March 2015 to December 2018.

Shecluded

Uddoh founded Shecluded in April 2019 after observing, during her role reviewing pitch decks at a seed funding company, that women were almost entirely absent from the pool of applicants for investment. Her motivation was also personal — she grew up in a single-parent home after her father's death and witnessed her widowed mother's businesses fail due to lack of access to credit and business information.

Shecluded provides business loans, insurance and business advisory services to women entrepreneurs in Nigeria and across Africa. By 2023, the company had built a community of over 200,000 women and deployed over ₦1 billion in loans. In 2023, the company launched the Shecluded Hub in Lagos as a physical space for women entrepreneurs.

Shecluded was selected as one of thirteen companies for the NASDAQ Milestone Makers programme in Spring 2021, focused on reducing inequalities as part of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Uddoh is a Halcyon Fellow and has been recognised by the Financial Alliance for Women for her work in gender-lens financing.