Haida Gwaii Institute Information Session

For Kudirat Oyiza Abdulkareem, a master’s student in UBC’s Faculty of Forestry & Environmental Stewardship, environmental research has never been separate from the people who live it every day.

A Path Rooted in People

Kudirat’s interest in forestry began long before she arrived at UBC. Growing up and studying in Nigeria, she found herself drawn to the relationship between communities and the natural resources they depend on for their livelihoods.

“During my undergraduate studies, I had opportunities to work with communities, and those experiences made me realize that environmental issues are rarely just about the environment,” she says. “They are also about people, livelihoods, access to resources, and the policies that shape all of these things.”

That realization set her on a path toward forestry, and more specifically, toward understanding how policy decisions affecting forest resources play out in the lives of the people who depend on them. At UBC, she has been able to pursue those questions from a wider vantage point. Her research now sits, as she describes it, “at the intersection of trade policy, gender, livelihoods, and forest conservation, with a particular focus on shea in Nigeria.”

Mentorship and Community

Kudirat credits much of her growth as a researcher to her supervisor and head of the Sunderland Lab, Professor Terry Sunderland. “He has given me the space to develop my ideas while also challenging me to think more deeply about the questions I am asking and the broader significance of the research,” she says.

“Having a thesis-based Mastercard Scholar in the lab like Kudirat has been invaluable,” said Sunderland. “She arrived with a deep, grounded understanding of the communities she works with, and that has shaped her research project. The kind of work that can speak directly to Nigeria’s expected upcoming policy review, not just to an academic audience. Thesis-based students bring a different kind of commitment: months of fieldwork, real relationships built with participants, and a willingness to let the data challenge their assumptions. Kudirat has done all of that with real care for the people she’s working with, and it shows in the quality of her research.”

She also points to the wider support system at the Faculty, which she says has helped her “navigate the many different parts of graduate school, from developing my research to preparing for fieldwork and connecting with opportunities beyond my thesis.”

That support has extended well beyond academics through the Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program, which Kudirat says has shaped her UBC experience “in ways that go far beyond financial support.” Being part of a community of Scholars from different backgrounds, she explains, “has given me a sense of belonging and a network of people who understand the journey of being far from home while pursuing something that matters deeply to you.” The Program, she adds, “has reminded me that education is not only about what you gain for yourself. It is also about what you are able to take forward and contribute to others.”

Researching a Policy in Real Time

Kudirat’s thesis examines what happened to women who depend on shea after Nigeria introduced a ban on the export of raw shea nuts. “Shea is much more than a product in many rural communities in Nigeria,” she explains. “It is connected to livelihoods, household income, women’s economic activities, and the landscape itself.” When the government introduced the export ban in 2025 to encourage more local processing and value addition, Kudirat became interested in “what that policy looked like from the perspective of the people who were actually living with the change.”

The timeliness of the policy shift was part of what drew her in. “This was a relatively new policy, so there was an opportunity to document what was happening while it was still unfolding rather than trying to reconstruct the story years later,” she says.

Women, she notes, occupy a central place in the shea value chain, “from collecting and processing shea to using the income to support their households.” But her research looks beyond income alone. “Shea trees are part of the landscape, and the decisions people make about managing or protecting those trees are connected to their livelihoods,” she says. “That is what makes the research interesting to me: it brings together trade policy, women’s livelihoods, and conservation in one story.”

In the Field

Kudirat’s fieldwork took her to Niger and Kwara States in Nigeria’s Middle Belt, where she engaged with women involved in shea activities, along with cooperatives, aggregators, processors, and other stakeholders across the value chain. She worked alongside research partners including the Department of Forestry and Wildlife Management at Bayero University Kano, the Global Shea Alliance, and the National Shea Product Association of Nigeria, whose support, she says, “was important in helping me navigate the field and connect with people within the shea sector.”

What stayed with her most was the welcome she received. “The women welcomed me with so much warmth, and many were willing to open up to me, share their experiences, and walk me through different parts of their lives and work,” she says. “I did not take that trust for granted.” She adds that it was meaningful “to see the research move from something I had been discussing in a university setting to something happening in real people’s lives.” The experience, she says, also taught her to be flexible, since working across communities and different points in the value chain “meant that I often had to adapt my plans to the realities on the ground.”

Research That Gives Back

For Kudirat, the act of research is itself a form of contribution. “Going into the field, working with these women, documenting their experiences, and creating an opportunity for their realities to be heard by a wider audience is already a form of giving back,” she says. Many of the women she spoke with, she notes, “have lived with these challenges for years, but their experiences are not always visible in policy discussions.”

With Nigeria’s review of the shea nut export policy expected in 2027, Kudirat hopes her findings can inform that process. “Policies are often designed around larger economic objectives such as local processing, industrialization, or value addition, but those policies also have very local consequences,” she says. “I hope my research can help show why those local realities matter when trade and environmental policies are being designed and reviewed, particularly when women and forest-dependent communities are involved.”

Looking Ahead

After completing her degree, Kudirat hopes to continue into a PhD, deepening her work on how policies affecting natural resources shape lives across Africa, and continuing to work with women “whose livelihoods depend on forest resources” as both economic actors and stewards of the land. She is also drawn toward policy analysis and strengthening the connection between research and real-world policy conversations, saying she wants “to ask questions that matter to communities, produce evidence that can be understood beyond academic spaces, and contribute to policy conversations where that evidence can actually be useful.”

Reflecting on her fieldwork, Kudirat sums up the lesson she plans to carry forward: “Research is not just about collecting data. It is about listening carefully, understanding people’s realities, and thinking about what we can do with that knowledge afterwards. That is something I hope to carry with me wherever my work takes me.”

Learn more about graduate studies at UBC FES.