There are few Nigerian women who have risen to the height which Ngozi Okonjo Iweala attained in local and global financial circles. She has performed so creditably well that one begins to wonder what factors contribute to the making of such a great woman.

What does her background look like, her upbringing, her educational career and the environment which add up to the making of such a colossus in the financial world. She is a princess born into a family of well educated Nigerian Royals on June 13, 1954. She hails from Delta State of Nigeria. She spent the early years of her life living with her grand-parents while her parents studied abroad.

Upon the return of her parents she moved with them to Ibadan, South west of Nigeria where her parents worked with the then University College of Ibadan now University of Ibadan. She later attended the girl’s school in Enugu and add a long break due to the civil war in Nigeria. She completed her secondary education at St Anne’s College in Ibadan.
Okonjo-Iweala is an Igbo from Ogwashi-Uku, Delta State where her father Professor Chukuka Okonjo is the Obi (King) from the Umu Obi Obahai Royal family of Ogwashi-Uku.

Okonjo-Iweala was educated at Harvard University, graduated in 1977, earned her Ph.D. in regional economic development from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1981. She is married to Ikemba Iweala from Umuahia, Abia State, and they have four children. The eldest, Onyinye Iweala received her Ph.D. in Experimental Pathology from Harvard University in 2008 and graduated Harvard Medical School in 2010.

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is a globally renowned Nigeria economist best known for her two terms as Finance Minister of Nigeria of its Managing Directors between october 2007 and july 2011.

She briefly held the position of Foreign Minister of Nigeria in 2006. In 2007, Okonjo-Iweala was considered as a possible replacement for former World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz, Subsequently, in 2012, she became one of three candidates in the race to replace World Bank President Robert Zoellick at the end of his term of office in June 2012.

Prior to her ministerial career in Nigeria, Okonjo-Iweala was vice-president and corporate secretary of the World bank Group She left it in 2003 after she was appointed to President Obasanjo’s cabinet as Finance Minister on 15 July 2003.
Following her role as Vice President in the World Bank the Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo asked her to be the Finance Minister of the country. The president was impressed with the brief on economic reforms he requested from her and asked her to serve as the Minister of Finance.

The position she held between 2003 and 2006,during this period she had a short stint as the Minister of foreign affairs. She left twice to serve as Finance Minister of Nigeria, under the dispensation of president Olusegun Obasanjo and president Goodluck Jonathan, came back in between the two presidents term in office to be the Managing Director of the World Bank Among Ngozi Iweala’s landslide achievements was In October 2005 when she led the Nigerian team that struck a deal with the Paris Club a group of bilateral creditors, to pay a portion of Nigeria’s external debt (US $12 billion) in return for an $18 billion debt write-off. Prior to the partial debt payment and write-off, Nigeria spent roughly US $1 billion every year on debt servicing, without making a dent in the principal owed.

She also introduced the practice of publishing each state’s monthly financial allocation from the federal government in the newspapers. This action went a long way in increasing transparency in governance. She was instrumental in helping Nigeria obtain its first ever sovereign credit rating (of BB minus) from Fitch and Standard & Poor’s.

Nigeria is considered to have defaulted on its sovereign debt in 1983 (debt rescheduling is considered a type of default by rating agencies). She resigned as Nigeria’s Foreign Minister on August 3, 2006 following her sudden removal as head of Nigeria’s Economic Team by former President Olusegun Obasanjo. She left that administration at the end of August 2006.
On October 4, 2007, World Bank President Robert Zoellick appointed her to the post of Managing Director, effective December 1, 2007. In 2011, Okonjo-Iweala was reappointed as Minister of Finance with the expanded portfolio of the Coordinating Minister for the Economy by President Goodluck Jonathan. She took a lot of heat, more-so than any other government official for the unpopular fuel subsidy removal policy by the Nigerian government which led to Occupy Nigeria protests in January 2012.
During her confirmation as a Minister, she stressed the need to reduce the country’s recurrent expenditure which is presently 74% of the National Budget and embark on capital projects which could improve the 14% unemployment rate in the country. In her role as the Coordinating Minister For the Economy and Minister of Finance, she has extensive influence/exercise to shape the direction of the Jonathan economic team and the transformation agenda.

In 2007, Okonjo-Iweala’s NGO, NOI Global Consulting, partnered with the Gallup Organisation to introduce an opinion poll, the NOI poll, into the Nigerian polity. Okonjo-Iweala also serves on the Advisory Board of Global Financial Integrityand on the Board of Directors of the World Resources Institute.

In 2011 Ngozi Okonjo Iweala was called back to Nigeria by President Goodluck Jonathan to head the economic team as Nigeria’s Finance minister. It was from this position that she contested the presidency of the World Bank. She received support for her ultimately unsuccessful campaign from a number of former World Bank employees and from publications including The Economist, Financial Times and Newsweek, which said “If competition follows normal process, Kim stands no chance [against Ngozi Okonjo Iweala].

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