In commemoration of International Women Day 2026, Dr. Princess Kelechi Oghene gathered some of Lagos’s most accomplished women to celebrate the day, what happened in that room was less celebration and more architecture.
There is a particular kind of event that Lagos has grown good at hosting. The kind with music, photographs, and motivational speeches that dissolve the moment the hall empties. Dr. Princess Kelechi Oghene has attended enough of them to know the difference. So when she organised the GAH International Women’s Day 2026 gathering in Lagos this March, she was deliberate about what it would not be.
“We wanted women to leave with partnerships, opportunities, mentorship, visibility, and momentum,” she said. “Real collaboration must create outcomes, not just optics.”
That sentence goes a long way toward explaining who she is and how she operates.
The Room She Built
The event drew women from across industries for a panel discussion centred on the theme, The Power of Collaboration. The choice of theme was not decorative. For Dr. Oghene, collaboration is a working concept, not a rallying cry, and the conversation she facilitated reflected that distinction. Attendees were not merely inspired. They were connected, introduced, and in several cases, already talking business before the afternoon was out.
Dr. Oghene is the Founder and Executive Chair of GMYT Group Ltd, a multi-arm enterprise that spans fashion training, media, real estate, a philanthropic foundation, and the GAH Awards platform. She also founded the GAH Elite Club. Across those arms, she has built what amounts to a small ecosystem of professional development and recognition, concentrated largely on women and African leadership.
The Lagos gathering was, in a sense, a live demonstration of her governing philosophy. She describes real collaboration as “the intentional exchange of value, access, wisdom, networks, and opportunity.” She is careful to separate that from what she calls building from scarcity. “It is when women stop competing from scarcity and start building from strategy.
That distinction matters to her. She returns to it often.
On Running Several Things at Once
Few people who meet Dr. Oghene for the first time immediately grasp the scale of what she manages day to day. A fashion academy, a foundation, an awards platform with continental reach, media interests, and real estate ventures all operate under the GMYT Group umbrella. Asked how she keeps it coherent, she gives an answer that strips the glamour from it.
“I do not run multiple brands by depending on energy or emotions. I run them through governance, clear teams, measurable goals, accountability systems, and a shared vision across the ecosystem.”
Each arm of the Group, she explains, was designed to address a distinct problem. The academy trains skills and produces entrepreneurs. The foundation widens access. The awards platform documents leadership. The media arm carries the stories. The business ventures sustain the whole. Together, they answer to one idea: empowerment through excellence.
The practical implication is that she is not holding chaos together. She is managing systems that were designed to hold themselves. “That,” she has said, “is the difference between being busy and being built.”
The Weight of Recognition
The GAH Awards have, over the years, honoured thousands of leaders across Africa. That volume raises a reasonable question: how does an award platform maintain credibility when it operates at that scale?
Dr. Oghene’s answer is straightforward. The platform protects its standards by protecting its selection process.
“Recognition loses value when standards disappear,” she said. The GAH evaluation does not track popularity. It tracks impact, consistency, resilience, innovation, and social contribution. The people honoured are those whose work has moved an industry, changed a community, or left something lasting behind.
The result, by most accounts, is a platform that recipients take seriously. The award, for many of them, functions as more than a plaque. It is a formal record that their work was seen and valued on a stage large enough to matter.
What 12,000 Women Walked In Not Knowing
To date, Dr. Oghene’s fashion academy has trained over 12,000 women in fashion and business. That number represents a significant body of practical work, and she speaks about it with the kind of specificity that comes from having watched the same transformation repeat itself across years.
Most of the women who walk in, she says, do not know what they are capable of. They arrive believing they need permission, rescue, or an unusual stroke of luck. Society, she has observed, conditions women to scale themselves down well before anyone asks them to.
“Many women come in believing they need permission, rescue, or luck. What many of them leave with is the realisation that they are more than capable. They are valuable, bankable, and able to lead.”
Some came looking for employment. Many left with the intention to build their own brands and employ others. Dr. Oghene describes that shift as the actual curriculum, the thing that the fashion training carries inside it.
Returning to School With Something Already Built
Dr. Oghene studied at several of the world’s leading business schools, not at the beginning of her career but well into it. The decision to go back confuses people who assume that formal education is for those who have not yet started. Her reason was more considered than that.
She was not going back because she lacked momentum. She went back because she respected growth and wanted tools commensurate with the scale she was building toward. “I wanted a deeper understanding of global systems, strategic management, leadership psychology, innovation, governance, and how world-class institutions think.”
The observation she keeps returning to is that experience, however substantial, has its own ceiling. “You need frameworks. You need perspective. You need exposure that stretches your thinking beyond local limitations.”
What she brought back from those classrooms was not a qualification to display. It was a sharper, more intentional approach to building institutions that could function on a global standard while doing their most important work at home.
What She Represents
Dr. Princess Kelechi Oghene is not a straightforward figure to categorise. She is an entrepreneur, an educator, an event organiser, a recognised leader in her own right, and, on the afternoon of International Women’s Day 2026 in Lagos, a host who understood that the most valuable thing she could offer her guests was not a speech but a room where serious things could begin.
That sense of practical purpose runs through everything she does. The GMYT Group is not assembled for show. The GAH Awards are not handed out lightly. The 12,000 women her academy has trained did not simply attend a programme. They went through something, and most of them came out changed.
What she is building, in the aggregate, is something older and more considered than a personal brand. It is an infrastructure, one designed to last and to keep working after any single event is forgotten.
Dr. Princess Kelechi Oghene is the Founder and Executive Chair of GMYT Group Ltd and the Founder of GAH Awards and the GAH Elite Club. She spoke with Ranks Africa Magazine ahead of and following the GAH International Women’s Day 2026 gathering in Lagos.
Ranks Africa Magazine | Women In Leadership Edition
