Two African women of eminence have found their place in the recently released Forbes list of 100 Most Powerful Women in the world. In the last two years, only one woman could find a place in the prestigious listing being done by the magazine. The two Africans on the list are Ethiopian President Sahle-Work Zewde, who was also the only African made into the 2018 list and Deputy United Nations Secretary-General Amina Mohammed, who hails from Nigeria. Importantly, they are very well known names in politics and diplomacy.
In 2017, the only African listed was Africa’s richest woman and daughter of former Angolan president Isabel dos Santos. However, in 2016, three African women found mention in the coveted list. They were Liberia President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Mauritius president at that time, Ameenah Gurib-Fakim and Nigeria’s business mogul Folorunsho Alakija.
Sahle-Work Zewde is Ethiopia’s first woman president and the only serving female head of state in Africa. A seasoned diplomat and veteran of the United Nations, she was appointed unopposed by parliament. Zewde’s appointment was widely hailed and construed as a symbolic gesture of Africa’s conscious move towards gender parity.
Amina J. Mohammed, the Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations was earlier a special adviser to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. She was a part of the team, which was instrumental in setting the 2030 Agenda for United Nation’s Sustainable Development. British-Nigerian by birth, Mohammed is a strong votary of preservation of the environment and had served as Nigeria’s environmental minister in 2016. She worked in three successive administrations in Nigeria, coordinating programs worth US$1 billion annually for protecting the environment in Nigeria.
