Linda Uzoamaka Christopher

Linda “Amaka” Uzoamaka Christopher is a first-generation student from Iruonwelu, Nigeria, a community where opportunities for girls’ education were limited. This background fueled her ambition to graduate summa cum laude in Economics from Adamawa State University. She has held roles as a mathematics tutor at Bellflower Academy, a budget and data analyst with the state Ministry of Finance, and later as a statistician at Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu University Teaching Hospital. In this role, she contributed to surveys, research, and data analysis that informed hospital finance, disease screening, pandemic control, and vaccine distribution. She also played a leadership role in the clinical services and ICT units. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she was an integral member of the government’s Task Force, helping to curb the spread of the virus. Having witnessed the devastation of Boko Haram terrorism in northeastern Nigeria and the lingering aftermath of the Biafran Civil War, Amaka’s passion has evolved toward strengthening institutions, a prerequisite foundation for sustainable growth, development, and resilience. She aspires to build a career at the intersection of institutional strengthening, financial systems, and data-driven approaches to advance inclusive growth. Amaka is proficient in Hausa and Igbo. Beyond academics, she enjoys weightlifting, cooking, and spending time with family and friends.

Summer internship

This summer, in what I coined “Strengthening the Impact of Village Funds,” I worked with the Social Development team at the World Bank in Jakarta, supporting the Village Budget Review for Indonesia. I developed a standardized database from raw administrative data in Bahasa Indonesia, designing workflows to clean and align large village-level datasets from the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Villages, and the Ministry of Home Affairs. This informed my quantitative models and cross-regional comparisons in assessing fiscal dependence and local revenue generation. I also supported field investigations for presentations in stakeholder consultations. A key takeaway was the importance of strengthening innovative financing mechanisms, impact monitoring systems, and stronger data infrastructure at the village level, to improve local revenue and reduce fiscal dependence and inequality. These experiences sharpened my technical skills while deepening my understanding of rural development, socio-political dynamics, and positioned me to bridge data analysis with policy dialogue.