Funke Adeoye
Oluwafunke Adeoye is a lawyer and human rights defender with 8 years’ experience working on human rights, social innovation and criminal justice issues. After undergoing a near death experience which resulted in a child loss, she decided to pursue purpose by founding Hope Behind Bars Africa, an organization that provides access to justice to indigent pre-trial inmates, builds the capacity of stakeholders in the criminal justice system and advocates for reforms. ‘Funke leads the capital defence team of her organization and oversees Made in Corrections, a social enterprise aimed at preventing recidivism by empowering incarcerated women and young persons. In 2020, with support from the German government, she supervised a project that saw female inmates producing reusable facemasks that were distributed for free to prison inmates and across 11 low-income communities in Nigeria’s capital city as part of the measures to prevent the coronavirus.
A graduate of law from the University of Benin, she is a Makwanyane fellow of Cornell University Centre on Death Penalty Worldwide, Ithaca, New York and a 2021 Mandela Washington Fellow. In 2018, she won Accountability’s lab SDG 16 Innovation Challenge where she graduated into the Accountability Lab’s Incubation program in 2019. ‘Funke is a 2020 LEAP Africa Social Innovation fellow and has been selected as a 2021 One Young World delegate through the European Commission Peace Ambassador’s Scholarship.
Committed to a life of service, Funke is a member of the Working Group Project: Private Sector implementation of the National Ethics and Integrity Policy 2020. She also serves as a contributory expert for the World Justice Project Rule of law Index since 2019. She was recognised in 2019 as a finalist of the future Africa award prize for advocacy (described by Bill Gates as Africa’s Forbes). In 2020, she was listed by the Attic London as one of the lawyers changing the world for the better in 2020.
Funke lives in Abuja, Nigeria with her husband, son and adopted daughters.