Breaking News: WTO members approve second term for DG Okonjo-Iweala
By Raymond Enoch
The WTO members today agreed to give incumbent Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala a second term as Director-General of the WTO. Her second four-year term, which was approved at a special General Council meeting, will begin on 1 September 2025. DG Okonjo-Iweala took office as Director-General in March 2021 and is the first African and the first woman to serve as head of the organization.
Bloomberg Task Force on Fiscal Policy for Health, among others. She is also a member of the G30 Group of top 30 people in International Finance and the council of the Prince of Wales’s initiative Earthshot Prize and an inaugural board member of the Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Foundation.
Previously, she was also a Senior Adviser at Lazard (2015-2019), and she served as the co-Chair of the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation with UK Secretary Justine Greening, and Chair of the World Bank’s Development Committee (2004). She was also a member of the International Monetary and Finance Committee of the IMF (2003-2006 and 2011-2015), the United Nations’ Secretary General’s High-Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda, the Danish Government-led Commission on Africa, the World Economic Forum Global Leadership Council on Transparency and Corruption, and the Commission on World Growth (led by Nobel Prize winner Professor Michael Spence). She served for a decade on the Rockefeller Foundation Board and the World Economic Forum Young Global Leaders. She was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Dr Okonjo-Iweala has also served on the advisory board of the ONE Campaign, the Clinton Global Initiative, the Global Development Network, and the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government.
Dr Okonjo-Iweala is the founder of Nigeria’s first ever indigenous opinion-research organization, NOI-Polls. She also founded the Center for the Study of Economies of Africa (C-SEA), a development research think tank based in Abuja, Nigeria. She is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Center for Global Development, and at the Brookings Institution, premier Washington D.C. think tanks.
Dr Okonjo-Iweala graduated magna cum laude with an A.B. in Economics from Harvard University (class of 1977) and earned a Ph.D. in Regional Economics and Development from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, 1981). She has received honorary degrees from 21 universities worldwide, including from: Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, Brown University, Trinity College (University of Dublin), Amherst College, Colby College, Tel Aviv University, Northern Caribbean University, Jamaica, University of Amsterdam, American University, Nyenrode Business University, London School of Economics and Political Science, and a host of Nigerian universities including Abia State University, Delta State University, Oduduwa University, Babcock University, and the Universities of Port Harcourt, Calabar, and Ife (Obafemi Awolowo).
She is the author of several books, including Women and Leadership: Real Lives, Real Lessons co-authored with Julia Gillard (Penguin Random House, July 2020), Fighting Corruption is Dangerous: The Story Behind the Headlines (MIT Press, 2018), Reforming the UnReformable: Lessons from Nigeria, (MIT Press, 2012), and The Debt Trap in Nigeria: Towards a Sustainable Debt Strategy (Africa World Press, 2003). She also co-authored with Tijan Sallah the book Chinua Achebe: Teacher of Light (Africa World Press, 2003). She has also published numerous articles including, Finding A Vaccine is Only the First Step (Foreign Affairs, April 2020), Mobilizing Finance for Education in the Commonwealth (Commonwealth Education Report 2019), Shine a Light on the Gaps — an essay on financial inclusion for African Small Holder Farmers (Foreign Affairs, 2015), Funding the SDGs: Licit and Illicit Financial Flows from Developing Countries (Horizons Magazine, 2016).
Dr Okonjo-Iweala is married to neurosurgeon Dr Ikemba Iweala. They have four children and five grandchildren.
