The Uganda National Oil Company (UNOC) Board of Directors has appointed Proscovia Nabbanja who was the company’s Chief Operating Officer (Upstream) as the new Chief Executive Officer.
Nabbanja, a geologist, has since August 2019 served as the Acting Chief Executive Officer following the resignation of the founding CEO Josephine Wapakabulo who spent three years in the job.
From November 2016 and August 2019, Nabbanja served as the Chief Operating Officer (Upstream) of the Uganda National Oil Company.
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.
Nabbanja 41, who is tasked with ensuring that UNOC becomes a profitable company that brings value to its shareholders, studied 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.
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 supervises a team of professionals who review the technical proposals from the oil companies, on all oil wells-related issues.
The data that her team collects is 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.
