Digital Nomads: Amara Uyanna has worked across four continents. She is not done.
It starts in an elevator in Paris, France.
It starts in an elevator in Paris, France.
On Saturday, April 4, 2026, Amara Uyanna was trying to catch a 10 a.m. flight, mentally checking off her usual work-travel list. Her suitcase in hand, she made her way to the lowest floor of a Parisian hotel where she had lodged; the elevator doors slid open, and she walked in. There, a stranger stepped in, whispering, almost to himself, “Bismillah.” Without thinking, she answered, “Bismillah,” too, their first connection in a foreign land.
When they got out of the elevator, they realised they were both headed to the airport. The man was still trying to find a ride. Uyanna, who was in a hurry to catch her flight, offered to share her Uber with him.
In the car, they fell into an easy conversation, switching between Arabic and English; the stranger and the Uber driver were surprised that she could speak Arabic.
Uyanna recalls this specific camaraderie fondly.
It is a snapshot of how she moves through the world: switching languages, sectors, and continents like she switches tabs on a laptop.
She works as the Chief of Staff at Schneider Electric, the global energy firm, yet her life and work history read like the itinerary of a perpetual commuter between worlds: oil and gas, global policy, media, fintech, crypto, and energy; Nigeria, the United States, the Middle East, Europe, and Southeast Asia.
“The vision is [to be] a global expert,” she told me. But that vision started far from Paris. This is the life of Uyanna, a globe-trotter.
Uyanna grew up in Lagos, where she finished primary school before winning a scholarship to Nigerian Turkish International College (NTIC) in Abuja for high school. She went on to Louisiana Tech University in Ruston, Louisiana, United States, to study Chemical Engineering & French. At a young age, she wanted to be the Managing Director of a global oil company, and for a while, she was on course to achieve that goal.
In the summer of 2015, she landed an internship at the Nigerian subsidiary of ExxonMobil, the multinational oil and gas firm. It came with the prestige she had dreamt about as a kid: the exposure, the above-average stipends, and other little privileges she earned from working in a Fortune 500 company.
During her internship, she visited the Qua Iboe Terminal, a crude oil export facility in Akwa Ibom State, southern Nigeria.
It felt like a dream assignment on paper: a front-row seat to the industry she’d always wanted to lead. But the reality was different. She watched as crude oil spills stained the waterways that the local communities depended on. She watched people cough in the air they were supposed to breathe, and she saw crops die in ways that felt anything but natural.
The work she had romanticised, she realised, was not as she had thought. It was rather an occupational hazard for the people living in a resource-rich region that did not feel rich at all.
Her quasi-honeymoon ended after that experience. In its place, a single, stubborn question took root: why wasn’t a multinational company held to the same environmental standards in Nigeria as it was abroad?
The answers she found were not enough. She went looking for better tools.
After her graduation in 2016, Uyanna felt her Chemical Engineering background was no longer enough. To change the rules, she realised, she had to sit in rooms where the rules were written.
She enrolled for a master’s in global policy at The Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin, in the US, focusing on development, innovation, and economics. In March 2016, during a summer break, she joined Sustainability International, a nonprofit working to clean up the Niger Delta region.
But philanthropy has its own bottleneck: donors were far removed from the affected region, she realised.
“I said to my boss [at Sustainability International], ‘let’s make a virtual reality documentary, so that way, we’ll be able to bridge the empathy gap,’” said Uyanna. “And even if people haven’t heard of where we are talking about, once they wear those headsets, we’ll take them there.”
Al Jazeera had just launched its Virtual Reality (VR) unit, Contrast VR, in 2017. Uyanna pitched the global media company a VR documentary that would visually pull people into the creeks of the Niger Delta, rather than just read about it. Al Jazeera said yes.
By May 2017, she was back in Nigeria with a six-person Al Jazeera crew, searching for a woman whose story would anchor the film. They chose a woman because Uyanna felt that when systems fail, women absorb the shock first and longest, and putting her at the centre would force the viewers to confront the human cost they usually scroll past.
“Every time there is some sort of systemic imbalance, women pay the price more,” she said.
The film followed Lessi Phillips, who was 16 when an oil pipeline burst in Bodo, a coastal town in Rivers State, southern Nigeria, in 2008, causing a major spill linked to the multinational oil firm Shell.
The VR documentary, “Oil in Our Creeks,” highlighted the environmental impact of oil spills on mangrove swamps and the Bodo community’s ten-year fight for justice, cleanup, and recovery.
The documentary premiered at film festivals in Amsterdam, Rio de Janeiro, and Vancouver, raising the funds needed for at least one pilot clean-up project. One of the villages needed $25,000 to clean up after the spills; the team raised well over that amount, according to Uyanna.
Months after the documentary premiered, Uyanna was back in the US, splitting her time between policy classes and her nonprofit work. Then the email came. Al Jazeera wanted her back. This time, not as a filmmaker, but inside the machine that made stories possible.
The network had an opening in its business operations unit for a programme manager.
Uyanna had never imagined herself working in news. But when she read the mission statement, something clicked: “to be fearless in the pursuit of truth and to be the voice of the voiceless.” It felt like a corporate version of the questions that had been keeping her up at night since Qua Iboe.
While completing her master’s in the US, she worked as a Technical Programme Manager at the network, building systems that connected the tech teams to finance, HR, legal, and editorial. Where other people saw “operations,” she saw a backstage wiring that made a global newsroom run.
When she graduated in 2018, Al Jazeera went a step further. The company filed a freelance contractor visa so she could relocate to Qatar. When she landed in Doha, the country’s capital city, she converted it into a full-time residency permit.
The freelance visa, which often requires sponsorship from a local entity, allowed Uyanna to legally live and work in the country for two years, opening a new chapter in her life in the Middle East.
Doha, for Uyanna, was the pivot point.
