The number on the table was her nation’s future: $30 billion of debt. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a Harvard- and MIT-trained Nigerian economist, sat across from the Paris Club of creditor nations and negotiated it away — $30 billion wiped out, $18 billion of it cancelled outright. Then, in 2021, she became the first woman and the first African ever to run the World Trade Organization. Some people break one ceiling. She keeps the receipts from several.
Okonjo-Iweala gave up a senior World Bank career to go home and serve as Nigeria’s Finance Minister from 2003 to 2006 — the first woman ever to hold the job. (In 2006 she also briefly became the first woman to serve as Nigeria’s Foreign Minister.) The debt deal was her signature: leading the negotiations that freed Nigeria from a $30 billion burden, $18 billion cancelled outright — money a young nation could aim at schools, roads and clinics instead of interest payments owed abroad.
She returned as Finance Minister from 2011 to 2015 under President Jonathan, doing the unglamorous, dangerous work of financial reform in a system that does not always reward it — and doing it as the most prominent woman in Nigerian public life, twice over.
First woman. First African. Seventy-five years in.
On March 1, 2021, Okonjo-Iweala took office as Director-General of the World Trade Organization — the first woman and the first African to lead it in the 75-year history of the GATT/WTO system. The referee of world trade, the institution that writes the rules every economy on Earth plays by, had never in three-quarters of a century been led by a woman, or by an African. In 2021 it was led by both in one person: a Nigerian economist who had once negotiated her own country’s way out of debt bondage.
And she is still there. WTO members reappointed her by consensus in November 2024, and her second term began in September 2025 — she is the sitting Director-General as you read this, running world trade through its most fractious era in generations, with the same technocrat’s calm she brought to the Paris Club table.
From erasing $18 billion of her country’s debt to presiding over the trade of nations: her career is an argument, conducted over decades, that the person a system least expects at the table may be the one who should have been seated at it all along.
Join the conversation
$18 billion, cancelled outright. First woman Finance Minister. First woman AND first African to run the WTO — and reappointed to a second term. Does Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala get the global fame her record has earned — and what ceiling in your own field is waiting for its first? Tell us below.
Source note: Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala’s account — a Harvard- and MIT-trained Nigerian economist who gave up a World Bank career to serve as Nigeria’s Finance Minister (2003–2006), the first woman to hold the job, and briefly in 2006 the first woman to serve as Foreign Minister; her leading the Paris Club negotiations producing a deal wiping out $30 billion of Nigeria’s debt, including $18 billion cancelled outright; her return as Finance Minister (2011–2015) under President Jonathan; her taking office on March 1, 2021 as Director-General of the World Trade Organization, the first woman and the first African to lead it in the 75-year history of the GATT/WTO system; and her reappointment by consensus in November 2024, with her second term beginning September 2025, making her the sitting Director-General at publish time — is from the WTO and her official biography, the Ahmadu Bello University honorary-degree citation, and GFM Review.
