Avenger of the Week | Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Director-General of the WTO

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala as she took over as new WTO Director-General on March 1, 2021. Photo credit: World Trade Organization [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Flickr.

Choosing the Avenger of the Week was easy. On March 1st, Nigerian-American economist and international development expert Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala became the first woman and the first African to serve as Director-General of the World Trade Organization (WTO), a 164-country group that deals with rules for 98% of all world trade.

Okonjo-Iweala was born in the ethnically Igbo town of Ogwashi-Ukwu, Delta State, Nigeria, and her father was Professor Chukwuka Okonjo, the Obi (ruler) from the Obahai Royal Family of Ogwashi-Ukwu. As a young teenager, she served as a cook for the Igbo-dominated rebels on the front lines in the civil war. She came to America to major in economics at Harvard University, received an international fellowship from American Association of University Women, and later earned a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Before heading the WTO, she had a 25-year career at the World Bank, reaching the number two position as Managing Director. She was also Nigeria’s first woman Minister of Foreign Affairs and its first woman Minister of Finance, where she was instrumental in obtaining Nigeria’s first ever sovereign credit rating, as well as in establishing programs for youth and young girls. A founder of Nigeria’s first public opinion research group and of the Center for the Study of Economics in Africa, Okonjo-Iweala serves on a number of corporate boards including Twitter, and on the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization. She has also been involved in committees at the UN, UNESCO, and the International Monetary Fund.

Unfortunately, when her appointment as Director-General of the WTO was announced, the Swiss newspaper Aargauer Zeitung and two others in the CH Media group ran the news story with the headline “This grandmother will become the new chief of WTO”.  There was a flood of criticism. No one could recall seeing any other high level international job announcements that described a man as a “grandfather”. UN Women Leaders and 124 Ambassadors in Geneva submitted a petition that called on the paper to apologize. The editor apologized for the “inappropriate and unsuitable’ headline. Okonjo-Iweala thanked the petitioners for their support on Twitter.

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is GenderAvenger’s Avenger of the Week for obvious reasons. Our thanks and congratulations goes out to Okonjo-Iweala for her series of firsts within the Nigerian government and her incredible rise to become the first woman and the first African Director-General of the WTO.

Go, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala!

The @GenderAvenger #AvengerOfTheWeek is @NOIweala, the first woman and first African to serve as Director-General of the @wto. 🌍 #GenderAvenger https://www.genderavenger.com/blog/avenger-of-the-week-ngozi-okonjo-iweala