Chime Asonye is a 2023 Millennium fellow, lawyer, and development practitioner. Currently, Asonye serves as the founder of Nigerian Mental Health, the country’s largest multidisciplinary community of practitioners with more than thirty mental health-focused organizations working to advance policy advocacy, research, and wellness programming.

Previously, Asonye served as innovation manager at COVIDaction, a UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office-led consortium supporting pandemic response in Africa through scaling local production and supporting indigenous solutions. Before COVIDaction, he worked as the advocacy manager at Partnership Initiatives in the Niger Delta, an independent foundation established by Chevron to alleviate poverty and instability in the oil-producing region of Nigeria. Earlier, he advanced the United Nations’ Global Goals, serving at the federal and subnational government levels of Nigeria. Asonye received a bachelor of arts in political science and philosophy from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He also holds a juris doctor from Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law.