The Uganda National Oil Company (UNOC) has unveiled Proscovia Nabbanja (in featured photo) as the Acting Chief Executive Officer (CEO), replacing Dr. Josephine Wapakabulo, who quit the job for greener pastures.
Wapakabulo will officially leave office tomorrow August 13, 2019, leaving Nabbanja to take full charge of the national oil company.
UNOC’s role is to handle the Uganda government’s commercial interests in the petroleum sector and to ensure that the resource is exploited in a sustainable manner. UNOC also aims at increasing participation of Ugandans in the oil and gas sector through employment and provision of goods and services.
But who is Nabbanja?
Proscovia Nabbanja is a Geologist with 19 years experience in the Oil & Gas industry.
She has been substantively the Chief Operating Officer – Upstream at UNOC for the last 3 years.
Prior to that, she served as a Senior Geologist at the Petroleum Exploration and Production Department (PEPD), in the Uganda Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development, the first woman to hold that position.
She was educated at Makerere University, Uganda’s oldest and largest public university, graduating with a Bachelor of Science in Geology and Chemistry.
Later, she obtained a Master of Science in Petroleum Geoscience, from the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, in London, United Kingdom.
She also holds a Master of Business Administration awarded by the Imperial College Business School, obtained in 2017. Her Certificate in International Petroleum, Oil and Gas Management was awarded by the Institute for Petroleum Management Inc., in Austin, Texas, United States.
Career
Nabbanja was hired by PEPD in 2000, right out of Makerere University, being the first female technical staff to be employed there.
Over the years, she was promoted and as of May 2013, she was at the rank of Senior Geologist. In that capacity, she was supervising a team of professionals who reviewed the technical proposals from the oil companies, on all oil wells-related issues.
The data that her team collected was used to estimate how much oil and gas lies beneath the ground in the country.
For a period of nineteen months, from April 2015 until October 2016, Nabbanja served as Acting Principal Geologist at PEPD, the position she left to join UNOC.
Nabbanja is a married mother of three children.
