Okonjo Iweala makes history to become first woman and First African Director-General of WTO

OKONJO IWEALA: First Woman and African to be appointed Director General of World Trade organization

After serving as Nigeria’s finance minister for 4 years, as the coordinating minister for Nigeria economy, serving as Nigeria’s foreign affair minister in 2006 and 25 years at World Bank, Nigeria’s Okonjo Iweala becomes first Woman and First African to be appointed as Director- General of the World Trade Organization.

Okonjo Iweala is the cape- wearing superhero of finance and economy. Euromoney named her global finance minister in 2005. After graduating from Harvard University with an AB in Economics, she proceeded to MIT (Massachusetts institute of technology) to earn/obtain her PhD

Okonjo was a guru during her initial 25 year career at World Bank. She rose to number 2 position of managing director as a development economist and headed initiatives of helping financial status of third world countries.

In Nigeria, Okonjo Iweala introduced the practice of publishing every state’s monthly financial allocation from the Federal government in Newspapers. This increased transparency a lot. She also helped formulate an electronic financial management platform- IPPIS (Integrated payroll and personnel information system) which successfully exposed about 62,000 ghost workers.

(Get book here)

To empower young entrepreneurs, Okonjo Iweala created the Youth Enterprise with Innovation program (YouWin) which created a lot of jobs for entrepreneurs.

Okonjo’s achievement would take several days to list because that is just how hard and wonderfully she has worked to ensure financial success globally. Therefore, we celebrate her today to be the first woman, the First African, and well, the First Nigerian to be Director General of the World Trade organization.

According to Aljazeera, she said in a statement that her first priority would be to quickly address the economic and health consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic. She said:

“Our Organization faces a great many challenges but working together, we can collectively make the WTO stronger, more agile and better adapted to the realities of today”

Who is Rachel Sibande? Read our Weekly Publication to know.

Go to home