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Amina J. Mohammed
A Nigerian planner ran the negotiation that wrote the seventeen goals every government now reports against.
The rise
Born in Liverpool on 27 June 1961 to a Fulani veterinary officer and a British nurse, raised in Kaduna and Maiduguri, she spent two decades in Nigerian project firms before advising the presidency on the MDGs. From 2005 she ran the Debt Relief Gains programme, turning Paris Club savings into clinics, schools and water.
What they did
Joining the UN in 2012 as Ban Ki-moon's adviser on post-2015 planning, she linked the Secretary-General, his high-level panel and the General Assembly's working group in the process that produced the 2030 Agenda and its 17 goals, adopted in September 2015. Nigeria's environment minister from 2015 to 2017, she has been Deputy Secretary-General since February 2017, reappointed in 2022.
The full picture
On 16 January 2017, days before joining the UN, she signed 2,992 CITES export permits for kosso rosewood, two weeks after her own export ban; an NGO, the EIA, said this freed 1.4 million logs stuck in Chinese ports. She replied that none was backdated, all covered files closed before the ban, and denied any link to the backlog.
Why it matters
Seventeen goals and 169 targets structure how every government and donor talks about development, and she ran the negotiation that wrote them; before that she had to turn a debt deal into classrooms someone could count.
“We say that youth are the future, and yet youth unemployment is at record highs. And where is the leap forward we promised women and girls?”