Tope is a social entrepreneur with 20 years of senior financial leadership experience, and has credentials as CPA, Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria. She finished 2nd best student in the professional exam level 1 (May 1999). She has served in multiple financial leadership roles, including with the American Federation of Teachers, a developing US jujitsu partner. She has Big 5 accounting experience starting with 5 years as an auditor for Arthur Anderson and later for four years with PWC, Price Waterhouse Coopers.

Tope founded several social impact ventures such as She-EO, a global network of women of African descent. She also co-founded a regenerative farming company Dodo Farms, as a voice of racial equity in ag, land and food access. At 25, she launched United for Kids Foundation (UKF) Inc., an organization, which has been serving children from low-income families in Nigeria since 2002. 

At 10 years old, she represented her school in a Nigeria state-wide debate competition, where she discovered her powerful voice. She started a musical group at 13 and produced artists who were paid from “admission fees” for the shows she produced out of her parents’ garage.

When she was 19 years old and in college, she read about a young man who lived hundreds of miles away from Lagos (her home state). He had been playing football when he got seriously injured. He needed to raise a significant amount of money for his treatment. She decided to use her “voice” to do what the world now calls “crowd-funding.” There were no mobile phones or internet at the time, so she cut out the page with his photo from the magazine, and she recruited one of her best friends to go door knocking with her. They knocked on hundreds of doors on the large University of Lagos campus. They got bits and pieces, and within days they had raised an unbelievable amount of funds. She recalls taking the cash to the magazine editor’s office, and everyone stared at her in disbelief.

Her childhood experiences led her to build United for Kids Foundation up from a group of 10 friends to a network of almost 500 donors with annual receipts of over Two Hundred and Fifty Million Naira. She handed over the reins of UKF to a group of young changemakers on August 1st, and she is already seeing signs that they will take the organization to places even she never imagined. 

United for Kids, u4kids.org, is beyond direct service. It’s a whole child approach with impact on parents, health, mentorship, financial inclusion, and foster care. They created a new free library system supporting 10 schools, and due to youth empowerment purpose, improved reading levels 300%, increased student participation, and provided scholarships to children to attend prestigious institutions. In response to the COVID pandemic, they pivoted to building a mobile library system, ensuring reading remained accessible for every child. Moreover, they have a program to support mothers to achieve financial independence, Mummy and me, with 8 microbusinesses generated. They also have a Donors Choose-like initiative for school supplies impacting 50,000 children.