Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala

Director-General, World Trade Organization (WTO)

Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is the Director General of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). She is an economist and international development expert with over 30 years of experience. She was Chair of the Board of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance (2016 – 2020), the African Risk Capacity (2014 – 2020) and Co-Chair of The Global Commission on the Economy and Climate. Previously, she served as Senior Advisor at Lazard and sat on the Boards of Standard Chartered PLC and Twitter Inc. Dr. Okonjo-Iweala was appointed as an AU COVID-19 Special Envoy and WHO COVID-19 Special Envoy.

Dr. Okonjo-Iweala served twice as Nigeria’s Finance Minister (2003-2006, 2011-2015), the first woman to hold the position, and spent a 25-year career at the World Bank rising to the No.2 position of Managing Director. She holds a Bachelor’s in Economics from Harvard University and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Featured work

External publication

A Global Deal for Our Pandemic Age

Report of the G20 High Level Independent Panel on Financing the Global Commons for Pandemic Preparedness and Response.

Lucrezia Reichlin, Guntram B. Wolff, Jean-Claude Trichet, Min ZHU, Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Ana Botin, Masood Ahmed, Vera Songwe, Jeremy Farrar, Lawrence H. Summers, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Jacob Frenkel, Rebeca Grynspan, Naoko Ishii, Michael Kremer, Kira Mazumdar-Shaw, Luis Alberto Moreno, John-Arne Røttingen, Mark Suzman, Tidjane Thiam, Ngaire Woods and Victor Dzau