Dr. Morénike Makinde

Dr. Morénike Makinde is a pension policy and retirement income strategist with over 18 years of leadership across banking, structured finance and public pension administration in Nigeria. She currently heads the Technical Department at the Lagos State Pension Commission (LASPEC), where she leads the teams responsible for computing, reconciling and disbursing retirement benefits for more than 50,000 state employees and retirees and contributes directly to statewide pension reform efforts.

Her doctoral research (DBA, Distinction, Franklin Hudson-ISM Paris) produced the Trust-Embedded Product Design (TEPD) framework, which argues that trust rather than access is the binding constraint on micro-pension uptake among informal-sector women. Her work sits at the intersection of public pension governance and private retirement planning, a vantage point few practitioners hold on both sides of at once.

Dr. Makinde is particularly interested in the gap between how pension systems are designed and how ordinary savers, especially women in the informal sector, experience and trust them. She speaks to both technical and public audiences, translating pension policy, financial inclusion and retirement product design into language non-specialists can act on.