Olutimehin Kukoyi

The Process

OluTimehin Kukoyi (formerly Adegbeye) is a Nigerian writer, speaker, and activist whose work focuses on Gender, Women’s Rights, Sex, Sexualities, and Sexual Violence, as well as Urban Poverty and Sustainable Development.

Her TED Talk, “Who Belongs in a City?”, was delivered at TEDGlobal 2017 in Arusha, Tanzania, and was chosen by TED Lead Curator Chris Anderson as one of the ten most notable talks of 2017, alongside Pope Francis, Elif Shafak, Elon Musk, and Sara Menker. OluTimehin has addressed audiences in Brazil, Ghana, Kenya, Norway, Uganda, and the United States, and has worked with the European Union in Nigeria, Shining Hope for Communities, UN Women, and other international civil society organisations.

Ms. Kukoyi has been published in multiple languages in print publications like StyleMANIA Magazine (Nigeria), Essays Magazine (South Africa), Klassekampen (Norway), and Women’s Asia 21 (Japan), among others. Her writing has also been published online by the African Feminist Forum, the African Women’s Development Fund, the Association for Women’s Rights in Development, Bistandsaktuelt, the Gender-Based Violence Prevention Network, Latterly Magazine, Open Democracy, Premium Times, This is Africa, and others.

OluTimehin is an alumna of the inaugural Writing for Social Justice workshop organised by AWDF in collaboration with FEMRITE (Uganda, 2014), the Farafina Trust Creative Writing workshop (Nigeria, 2015), and the BRITDOC Queer Impact Producers Lab (USA, 2017). She is a Carrington Youth Fellow and a Women Deliver Young Leader.

Her personal writing includes memoir, creative non-fiction, poetry, and auto-fiction, and she is currently working on her first collection of essays. OluTimehin lives in Lagos, Nigeria with her daughter.