Nigeria: Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Africa at the top of world trade

Twice Nigeria’s Finance Minister, Managing Director of the World Bank, Harvard and MIT graduate, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is an economist with an excellent career. On 15 February 2021, she was appointed as Director-General of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Her term will begin on March 1, 2021. 

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a career-rich economist with 25 years of experience at the World Bank, will lead the WTO for the next four years. During her tenure, the 66 year-old Nigerian will have to overcome the current challenges faced by the organization for years. With a career built over many challenges, the economist demonstrates competency to pull up the organization. «Something totally different is needed to revive the WTO and this is what I can offer », she said during her campaign.

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala was born in 1954 in the Niger Delta and grew up in a context marked by the civil war in Biafra, Nigeria. At the age of 19, she left the country and headed for Harvard in the United States, then Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where she obtained a PhD in regional economics and development in 1981. In 1982, she joined the World Bank where she worked for more than twenty years. 

In 2003, she was called by the Nigerian President Olesegun Obasanjo to become Minister of Finance. She held this position from 2003 to 2006 and then from 2011 to 2015 and was also briefly Minister of Foreign Affairs. 

She became famous in Nigeria, notably by succeeding in erasing Nigeria’s public debt, by privatising many companies to create competition in the country, but above all by actively fighting corruption in the country. This led to the kidnapping of her mother in the Niger Delta, ransom demands and her resignation to release her. However, she managed to escape her captors, despite being 83 years old.

In 2007, she was appointed managing director of the World Bank and ran for the presidency of the Bank in 2012, but failed in front of the American Jim Yong Kim.

In 2015, after leaving the Nigerian government, she chaired the Board of Directors of Gavi Alliance, an organization that promotes vaccines and immunization in Africa. In 2020, she was candidate to lead the WTO in competition with South Korea’s Yoo-Myung-Hee, who finally dropped out of the race. In February, she became Director-General of the WTO.

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has received numerous awards. In 2019, she was ranked by Transparency International as one of the “8 anti-corruption women fighters”. In 2004, she was named Finance Minister of the Year for Africa and the Middle East by Le Banquier Magazine.