Amina Jane Mohammed’s success is an inspiration to many women from Northern Nigeria.
Born on June 27, 1961, in Liverpool, England, to a Hausa-Fulani veterinarian and a British nurse. Amina J. Mohammed is oldest of five daughters.
She went to Buchan School on the Isle of Man in addition to primary schools in Nigeria’s Kaduna and Maiduguri. In 1989, she also enrolled at Henley Management College. Her father insisted she go back to Nigeria when she finished her schooling.
Career
Amina J. Mohammed worked at Archon Nigeria, a Nigerian architectural design company affiliated with Norman and Dawbarn in the United Kingdom, between 1981 and 1991. She established Afri-Projects Consortium in 1991, serving as its Executive Director until 2001.
Amina later served as the Nigerian President’s Senior Special Assistant for the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). She was responsible for coordinating the Nigerian debt reduction funding for the MDGs in 2005. Her responsibilities included creating a Virtual Poverty Fund with cutting-edge strategies for reducing poverty, coordinating and monitoring the budget, and advising on topical problems involving poverty, public sector reform, and sustainable development.
Later, A. Mohammed established and served as the chief executive officer of the Center for Development Policy Solutions and served as an adjunct professor for Columbia University’s Masters in Development Practice program. She participated in various international advisory boards and panels, including the High-Level Panel on the Post-2015 established by the UN Secretary-General. She also managed the Task Force on Gender and Education for the United Nations from 2002 to 2005.
Amina later served as the Independent Expert Advisory Group on the Data Revolution for Sustainable Development’s Independent Expert Advisory Group and the Senior Special Assistant to the President of Nigeria on the Millennium Development Agenda. Additionally, she presided over the advisory board for the Global Monitoring Report on Education of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) (GME).
Amina Mohammed played a significant role in the Post-2015 Development Agenda process in 2012 when she was appointed as Ban Ki- moon’s special adviser on Post-2015 development planning. She served as a liaison in this capacity between the Secretary-General, his High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons (HLP), and the Open Working Group (OWG) of the General Assembly, among other parties.
She also participated in the Independent Expert Advisory Group on the Data Revolution for Sustainable Development for the Secretary-General beginning in 2014. From November 2015 to February 2017, Amina J. Mohammed served as the federal minister of the environment in President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration. She served as Nigeria’s representative on the Paul Kagame-led African Union (AU) Reform Steering Committee at the time. She left the Federal Executive Council of Nigeria on February 24, 2017.
An advocacy group charged Amina Mohammed in 2017 of giving Chinese companies unauthorized permission to import critically endangered Nigerian timber when she served as Nigeria’s environment minister.The Nigerian government has refuted the claims.
Mohammed is currently serving as the fifth Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations to António Guterres, who announced her appointment in January 2017. She participates in the UN Interagency Coordination Group on Antimicrobial Resistance in this capacity (IACG).
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