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| Ngozi Okonjo Iweala, Finance Minister |
The Coordinating Minister for the Economy and Minister of
Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has been honoured with an Honorary Doctor of
Laws Degree by the respected American Ivy League institution, the University of
Pennsylvania (UPenn).
The institution recently awarded honorary degrees to a
select group of distinguished personalities from around the world for high
achievement in various spheres. Others who were awarded included: United States
Vice President, Joseph Biden Jnr, and Chairman/Chief Executive Officer of Xerox
Corporation, Ursula Burns, who is the first African-American woman to head a
Fortune 500 company.
According to the citation read at the ceremony:
“Okonjo-Iweala is responsible for managing the finances of Africa’s most populous
nation and one of the world’s fastest growing economies. She’s a former
managing director of the World Bank where she had oversight responsibility for
the bank’s $81 billion operational portfolio in Africa, South Asia, Europe and
Central Asia. She also spearheaded initiatives to assist low-income countries
during the food crisis and later the financial crisis and she chaired the
raising of $49.3 billion in grants and low-interest credit for the world’s
poorest nations.”
Also honoured at the ceremony were: Princeton University
professor, Kwame Appiah, who is a widely published philosopher and cultural
theorist, whose work on race, identity, politics and moral philosophy has
helped change our understanding of human behaviour; Path-breaking electrical
engineer, James Edward West, whose co-invention of the electret microphone
revolutionised the telephone and recording industries in the 20th century- it
remains the dominant technology for the microphones of today; Penn Professor of
Sociology, Samuel Preston, who is one of the world’s foremost demographers.
Preston is responsible for the “Preston curve,” which is widely used to
identify factors responsible for gains in life expectancy.
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