You can call me Jemima, but my friends call me Dara ◡̈
I’m a product designer based in Lagos. Eight years in, and I’m still most drawn to the problems that sit at the edges of who a product is built for.
Every design decision is a choice about who matters. What you build, what you don’t, who you make room for—none of it is neutral. Good design, to me, is just inclusive design. Not a layer you add at the end, but the thing itself.
I keep coming back to the same kinds of people because I know what it feels like to not be designed for. As a Black, Nigerian woman, I’ve run into services that treat my existence as a risk—flagged, rejected, or simply not considered. It’s a specific kind of frustration. But it’s mild compared to what people with disabilities navigate every day—on the web, where barriers are often invisible to everyone except the person hitting them, and in physical spaces too. In Nigeria, a lot of our infrastructure simply wasn’t built with disabled people in mind: no ramps, no tactile paving, no lifts. And beyond the built environment, there’s still a deep stigma—disability is too often treated as something to be hidden or pitied rather than accommodated and included. Most digital products here don’t do much better. Not out of malice, usually, just out of who wasn’t in the room when decisions were made, and who still isn’t.
That needs to change. I think about that a lot.
That’s why I care about infrastructure—the design systems and patterns that quietly shape everything downstream. Get those right and inclusion scales. Get them wrong and the same exclusions replicate, quietly, everywhere. That’s where the things you value actually live.
I grew up knowing that wahala no dey finish—problems are endless. A good day’s work is easing one.
Outside the work, I’m learning to sit with things: taking photos of people and places I want to remember, cooking for the people I love, planning trips to places I’ve been dreaming about. Slowly, joyfully, without turning any of it into a project.