Global Economy Prize 2023

Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is the seventh Director-General of the WTO. She took office as WTO Director-General on 1 March 2021, becoming the first woman and the first African to serve as Director-General. She is a global finance expert, an economist and international development professional with over 30 years of experience working in Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America and North America. 

She graduated magna cum laude with an A.B. in Economics from Harvard University (1976) and earned a Ph.D. in Regional Economics and Development from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, 1981). She has received honorary degrees from 15 universities worldwide.  

Dr Okonjo-Iweala had a 25-year career at the World Bank as a development economist, rising to the No. 2 position of Managing Director, Operations. She served twice as Minister of Finance and Economy of Nigeria (2003-2006 and 2011-2015) and briefly acted as Foreign Minister in 2006, the first woman to hold these positions. Her achievements as Finance Minister garnered international recognition for improving Nigeria’s financial stability (e.g., she negotiated $30 billion in debt relief with rich countries) and fostering greater fiscal transparency to combat corruption. She is a skilled and tenacious negotiator and is considered an effective consensus builder who enjoys the trust of governments and other stakeholders.

She is a firm believer in the power of trade to lift developing countries out of poverty and assist them to achieve robust economic growth and sustainable development. As Finance Minister, she was involved in trade negotiations with other West African countries and contributed to the overhaul of Nigeria's trade policy enabling it to enhance its competitiveness. 

Dr Eleni Gabre-Madhin currently serves as the Chief Innovation Officer of the United Nations Development Programme’s Regional Bureau for Africa, where she is taking the lead in launching timbuktoo, a revolutionary private-public Youth Start-up Innovation Financing Facility for Africa. She has over 25 years of experience in designing and implementing innovative solutions and is a globally recognized thought-leader and respected voice on African development, agricultural commodity markets, entrepreneurship and youth innovation. Before joining UNDP, she held prior senior positions at the World Bank, the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, D.C., the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in Geneva and served on the boards of a number of international corporate and non-profit organizations. 

Dr. Gabre-Madhin is founder and chief executive of blueMoon, Ethiopia’s top incubator and early-stage agribusiness startup investor, as well as founder and chair of Ethiopia’s first co-working space company, blueSpace. Prior to this, she founded eleni, Africa’s leader in designing, building, and supporting commodity exchanges in frontier markets, with projects in Ghana, Tanzania, Nigeria, Mozambique, Cameroon, and Rwanda. Between 2006 and 2012, Eleni conceived, designed, and ran the highly acclaimed Ethiopia Commodity Exchange (ECX), successfully trading $1.2 billion annually after just 3 years of operation and impacting the livelihoods of over 15 million small farmers. 

Gabre-Madhin holds a doctorate in applied economics from Stanford University, a MSc in Agricultural Economics from Michigan State University and a B.A. in economics from Cornell University. 

Leonard Wantchekon is the James Madison Professor of Political Economy and Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, and founder and president of the African School of Economics.  

A scholar with diverse interests, Wantchekon has made substantive and methodological contributions to the fields of political economy, economic history, and development economics. 

He has conducted groundbreaking studies of political institutions and governance, using field experiments with real politicians participating in real elections to examine the effects of broad political messages and campaign strategies on voting behavior and outcomes.  

In "The Paradox of Warlord Democracy," he introduced a new philosophical approach to political economy by examining the conditions under which liberal democracies can emerge from civil wars and outlining the implications of this argument for classical political theory and contemporary social theory regarding democratization and authoritarianism. 

In addition, Wantchekon's research includes groundbreaking studies of the long-term impact of historical events. His paper "Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa" (AER, 2011, co-authored with Nathan Nunn), for example, links current differences in trust levels within Africa to the transatlantic slave trade and the Indian Ocean slave trade, and is widely considered one of the foundational works in the emerging field of cultural economics. His paper "Critical Junctures" (co-authored with Omar Garcia Ponce) also concludes that the level of democracy in Africa after the Cold War can be traced to the nature of the anti-colonial independence movements. 

More recently, Wantchekon has developed a novel approach to studying the impact of education on social mobility by analyzing historical microdata from the first regional schools in late 19th and early 20th century Benin.  

The African School of Economics (ASE), which he founded, gives students from all over West Africa the opportunity to attend an internationally competitive master's program. ASE strives not only to provide young researchers with rigorous methodological training, but also to give them the opportunity to actively apply the theoretical knowledge gained to current societal problems in close collaboration with government agencies, international organizations and businesses. The University's multidisciplinary curricula, which combine modern economic thinking with African history, provide students with a dynamic understanding of the processes and events that shape development across the continent.