Tosin Akinyemi, HR Director, British American Tobacco

Tosin Akinyemi is the Human Resources Director for British American Tobacco (BAT), West Africa Area with primary responsibilities of providing people and business leadership to the organisation as a member of the executive team for West Africa.

He started his career as a HR consultant initially with Accenture Nigeria where he was a consultant providing best practice HR advisory services & solutions to major Oil & Gas companies across the upstream industry in Nigeria. He left Accenture to join Heirs Advisory Services (now Nextzon) where he similarly provided business advisory support and consulting services to the various companies within the HEIRS Alliance Group and also had responsibility for driving the HR Consulting unit of HEIRS Alliance. He subsequently joined Vic Lawrence & Associates (VLA) where he set-up and led the HR Consulting unit of the firm servicing key clients across the Banking industry & Public sector.

Following his consulting career, he joined MTS 1st Wireless as the Head of the Human Resources Division where he led the transformation of the function to a full-fledged strategic partner to the business. He left the company in 2007 to join British American Tobacco (BAT), West Africa.

Tosin has over the last 9 years with BAT worked in various capacities - he was initially the Head of Reward for Nigeria, Benin, Niger & Togo following which he proceeded to South Africa as HR Business Partner for Marketing and then subsequently was the Head of HR for Operations across Southern Africa.

He returned to Nigeria in 2011 as the Head of Organisation Effectiveness for West Africa - a position he held until September 2014 when he was appointed as the HR Director for West Africa.

Tosin is happily married with 3 beautiful daughters. He enjoys travelling and spends his personal time bonding with his closely knit family.