Mrs. Efua Ghartey

First Female President of the Ghana Bar Association

Mrs. Efua Ghartey was born on 23rd March 1965 and is an old student of Wesley Girls' Senior High School and an alumna of the University of Ghana. She was called to the Bar in 1991. She trained in Basic and Advanced Securities at the Ghana Stock Exchange in 1998 and holds a Certificate in Alternative Dispute Resolution from the California State University, Sacramento Centre for African Peace and Conflict Resolution, in collaboration with the University of Ghana.

She was a Legal Aid Officer before joining Akufo-Addo, Prempeh & Co. as an associate from 1991 to 1994. She serves as a member of the Governing Board of the Ghana Alternative Dispute Resolution Centre, is a Legal Advisor to Wesley Girls' High School and a member of the Legal Advisory Committee of the Methodist Church Ghana. She is also an active member of the International Federation of Women Lawyers (FIDA), where she has served in various executive roles, including Public Relations Officer, Acting Treasurer and Junior Executive Member.

Mrs. Efua Ghartey is the Vice Chairperson of the Christian Lawyers Fellowship. She was part of the Chief Justice's Mentoring programme, acting as a facilitator and speaker for about 10 years, and is a member of the Commonwealth Lawyers' Association and the International Bar Association.

She co-founded Ghartey & Ghartey in 1994. In 2024 she became President of the Ghana Bar Association, making history as the first female president of the GBA since its inception in 1876. She has championed mentorship for young women in law and pushed for bolder gender reforms. A woman of faith, she has served as chairperson of the Global Board of United Bible Societies Worldwide, the Bible Society of Ghana and World Vision Ghana.

Mrs. Felicia Gbesemete

First Female Vice-President of the Ghana Bar Association

Mrs. Felicia Gbesemete is a product of Ghana International School. She was called to the Bar in October 1969.

She worked at Bruce-Lyle, Bannerman, Asamoah Attorneys before leaving to set up her own firm, Lex Consult, in 1984 with Mrs. Stephanie Baeta Ansah.

She has been active at the GBA and was its first female Vice-President, from 2004 to 2007. She chaired the Law Firm Licensing Committee as well as other committees of the GBA.

She has also served on many boards, including the Board of Ghana International School and the Full Gospel Businessmen Association. She is honoured as the first female Vice-President of the GBA.

Mrs. Essie Matilda Forster

Ghana's First Female Lawyer

Mrs. Essie Matilda Forster (née Christian) was born on Tuesday, 12 September 1922. She began her education in England at five years old and, like her father, became a lawyer.

She was called to the English Bar at Gray's Inn, London, in November 1945 and subsequently to the Gold Coast Bar on 15 April 1947, making her the first woman lawyer in the Gold Coast and the third woman lawyer in British West Africa. That same year she was called to the Gambian Bar, where she practised for four years, from 1947 to 1951. In July 1951 she moved from The Gambia to the Gold Coast and led a distinguished life in professional and public service.

Her notable achievements include:

• Acting Registrar of Companies, Births and Deaths in Accra for six months.
• In-house Lawyer, Mobil Oil Ghana Ltd for about 25 years, from 1957 to 1982.
• Member, Accra Magisterial District Prohibition Committee.
• Founding Member, International Federation of Women Lawyers (FIDA) Ghana.
• Chairperson, Nurses and Midwives (Accra) Schools Board from 1969 to 1972.
• Founding Member, Ghana International School Committee from 1954 to 1959.
• Vice President and Secretary, YWCA Hostel Committee.
• Secretary, Ridge Church Sunday School from 1963 to 1980.
• President, Ghana Girl Guides Association.
• Substitute Member, Constitution Committee of the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts from 1972 to 1975.
• President, Inner Wheel Club of Accra.

Her appointment as Mobil's in-house legal adviser blazed the trail, setting a precedent in Ghana for big corporations to employ lawyers as permanent staff. Through FIDA-Ghana she contributed to reforms in Ghana's laws on intestate succession, widowhood rites, abortion and child maintenance: novel areas of law where she championed the best interests of women and children. She mentored many who aspired to be like her.

A beloved wife and mother, she was married to Prof. Edward Francis Bani Forster, a Gambian and the first African psychiatrist at the Accra Mental Hospital, with whom she had three children. At the time of her elevation, in August 1988, to practise before the superior courts, she was 75 years old and the most senior lawyer of the Ghana Bar.

Today, we salute and honour her for opening the door, and keeping it open, for women lawyers in Ghana and elsewhere in Africa.

Justice Mrs. Annie Jiagge

First Woman Judge

Justice Mrs. Annie Jiagge (née Baeta) was born on Monday, 7 October 1918. She attended Achimota College and earned a teacher's certificate in 1937. She passed the London Matriculation Examination in 1945 and was admitted to the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1946. She earned her Bachelor of Laws degree in 1949 and was called to the English Bar at Lincoln's Inn in 1950. The University of Ghana conferred a Bachelor of Laws (honoris causa) on her in 1974.

Her notable accomplishments include:

• Established private law practice, 1950.
• First woman District Court Magistrate, 1953.
• Circuit Court Judge, 1959.
• Founding Member and President, YWCA Ghana from 1955 to 1960.
• First female High Court Justice, 1961.
• Council Member, University of Ghana from 1961 to 1976.
• Ghana's Representative, United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (UNCSW), 1962 to 1972; Rapporteur, 1966.
• Principal Drafter, 1967 Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, the precursor to CEDAW.
• First woman Court of Appeal (then Ghana's highest court) Justice, 1969; President of the Court of Appeal from 1980 to 1983.
• Founder and Chairperson, Ghana National Council on Women and Development, 1975.
• Co-Founder, Stichting to Promote Women's World Banking (now Women's World Banking).
• President, World Council of Churches from 1975 to 1983; Moderator of its Programme to Combat Racism from 1984 to 1991.
• Member, Committee of Experts who drafted Ghana's current Constitution in 1991.
• Member, Council of State from 1993 to 1996.

She died on 12 June 1996, after blazing the trail in incontrovertible fashion.

Justice Georgina Theodora Wood

First Female Chief Justice of Ghana

Her Ladyship Justice (Mrs.) Georgina Theodora Wood (Rtd.) was born on 8th June 1947. She is an old student of Wesley Girls' Senior High School, Cape Coast. She pursued her Bachelor of Laws degree at the University of Ghana and was called to the Bar in 1970 after completing her professional training at the Ghana School of Law. She served as a Public Prosecutor in the Ghana Police Service for three years.

She joined the Bench as a Magistrate of the District Court in 1974 and rose through the court system until she was appointed Chief Justice of the Republic of Ghana in 2007. She also served as a seasonal Justice of the Supreme Court of The Gambia between 2004 and 2007, was a member of the working committee that designed Ghana's court-connected ADR programme, and chaired the committee responsible for mainstreaming ADR in the Ghanaian courts.

She has lectured judges, lawyers and civil organisations on ADR at the Judicial Training Institute (JTI) and taught Civil Procedure and ADR in the Judicial Service Career Magistrate Programmes. She was an external examiner in Advocacy and Ethics for over 10 years at the Ghana School of Law, and was appointed to the special team of the International Bar Association (IBA) and International Legal Assistance Consortium (ILAC) to Kenya on judicial reforms. In 2015 she served on the Judges and Magistrates Vetting Board of Kenya as one of three non-Kenyans from Commonwealth countries, and she has served on the Board of the Global Justice Centre and on international advisory bodies on HIV, the law and human rights.

In 2017 she was sworn in as a member of the Council of State and was reappointed in 2021. She has received numerous awards, including a Doctor of Laws degree (LLD, honoris causa) from the University of Ghana in 2017, a Peace Award from the Centre for African Peace and Conflict Resolution, California State University, in 2011, and an International category award from the Trumpet Awards Foundation in 2011.

Justice Prof. Ekua Kuenyehia

First Female Law Professor & Dean, University of Ghana School of Law

Justice Professor Ekua Kuenyehia was born on 1st January 1947. She is an old student of Achimota School. She attended the University of Ghana, Legon, and Oxford University, and was called to the Bar in 1971. She served as a judge of the International Criminal Court from 2003 to 2015.

She lectured at the Faculty of Law of the University of Ghana and became the first female law professor at the then Faculty of Law (now School of Law), and later its first female Dean. She taught criminal law, gender and the law, international human rights law and public international law, and coordinated a sub-regional research network, Women and Law in West Africa, covering Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and The Gambia. She served as a visiting professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands and Temple University in the United States, was Acting Director of the Ghana School of Law in 2001, President of Mountcrest University College in 2017, and a board member of Standard Chartered Ghana in 2017.

Prof. Kuenyehia was one of the first board members of the Africa regional network, Women in Law and Development in Africa (WiLDAF). An active member of FIDA-Ghana, she served as its president from 1988 to 1992. She has been a pioneer advocating equal opportunity, justice and development for women in Ghana and around the world, and is co-author of a textbook on Women and Law in Sub-Saharan Africa, published in August 2003. She served on the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) from 2002. Her awards include the coveted Mensah Sarbah Memorial Prize, the Africa Genius Award in 2017, and an honorary degree for distinguished international leadership and statesmanship from the University of Ghana in 2016.

Justice Joyce Adeline Bamford-Addo

First Female Speaker of Parliament

Rtd. Justice Joyce Adeline Bamford-Addo was born in Accra on 26th March 1937 to Colonel William Murray Harry Bamford and Florence Vida Caster. Her father was an Englishman and her mother was from Aburi, Akwapim. She is a mother of five adult children.

She attended Holy Child Secondary School, completing in 1956, and proceeded to the United Kingdom in 1957 to study law. In England she was a member of the Honourable Society of Inner Temple and was called to the Bar of England and Wales in 1961.

Called to the Bar of Ghana in 1963, she began her working life that December as an Assistant State Attorney at the Attorney-General's Department in Accra. She rose to Chief State Attorney and was appointed Director of Public Prosecutions in 1976, the first female in Ghana to hold the position. She was elevated to the Supreme Court in 1994, again the first woman to do so, and retired in 2004. After retiring from the Judicial Service, she was elected Speaker of Ghana's Parliament in 2008, serving until 2013.

In Ghana, Justice Joyce Bamford-Addo goes down in history as:

• First female Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), 1976.
• First female Justice of the Supreme Court of Ghana, 1994.
• First female Speaker of Parliament in Ghana and in the West African sub-region, 2009.
• Member of the Consultative Assembly that drafted Ghana's 1992 Constitution.
• First female Acting President of the Republic of Ghana, 2010.
• Woman of the Year 2000 (American Biographical Institute).
• Companion of the Order of the Volta, 2011.
• Doctor of Laws (Honoris Causa), UPSA, 2023.

Mrs. Betty Mould-Iddrisu

First Female Attorney-General of Ghana

Mrs. Betty Mould-Iddrisu was born on 22 March 1953. She attended Achimota School, read for her Bachelor of Laws (LLB) at the University of Ghana and obtained her Master's degree in law (LLM) from the London School of Economics in London in 1978. She was called to the Ghanaian Bar in 1979. In the early 1980s she became an active member of the Ghana branch of FIDA, holding several executive positions, and rose to chair both FIDA-Ghana (1994 to 1996) and the FIDA-Africa group (1996 to 1998). She helped establish Ghana's first Legal Aid Centre, comprising a legal aid clinic and a legal literacy centre, in 1986.

She became Ghana's first female Attorney-General and Minister of Justice in 2009. In office she streamlined the Ministry, built the capacity of state attorneys nationally and internationally, expanded the regional offices and the prosecutions division, and championed the expansion of legal education by helping to establish more law schools. She headed the International Law Division at the Ministry of Justice and was appointed Copyright Administrator of Ghana in 1989. An acknowledged global expert in intellectual property law, she represented Ghana and Africa as a speaker, expert, chair and consultant to the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and other multilateral agencies. She co-founded the African Women Lawyers Association (AWLA) in 1999.

She pioneered the teaching of Intellectual Property Rights at the University of Ghana's Faculty of Law as a final-year elective, which she taught herself. She was appointed Director of the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Division of the Commonwealth Secretariat in 2003, and was a member of Ghana's Domestic Violence Coalition that pushed for the passage of the Domestic Violence Law. She served as Minister of Education from 2011 to 2012 and is currently Managing Partner of BMD Global Consultancy. In 2012 the Young Politicians of Ghana named her Honoree of Female Empowerment, a testament to influence that reaches well beyond the legal space.

Mrs. Grace Adubea Orleans

First Woman Solicitor General

Mrs. Grace Adubea Orleans (née Barko) was born on 6th August 1932. Her primary education was at Presbyterian Primary School, Somanya (1938 to 1942), followed by Krobo Girls' Boarding School (1943 to 1947) and Aburi Girls' Secondary School on full scholarship (1948 to 1951).

Selected to sit the Cambridge Ordinary Level Examination a year ahead of her peers while in Form 4, she excelled. She completed her post-secondary teacher training in 1953 and taught in Kumasi for a few years before proceeding to the United Kingdom to study law. She was admitted as a student at Gray's Inn on 30th October 1959 and called to the Bar in England on 5th February 1963. She returned to Ghana and was called to the Ghana Bar on 31st August 1963.

Her law career began as an Assistant State Attorney at the Attorney-General's Department in 1964. During a 33-year career she rose through State Attorney, Senior State Attorney, Principal State Attorney and Chief State Attorney to become Solicitor General in 1994, the first female Solicitor General of the Republic of Ghana. As Solicitor General she was administrative head of the Legal Service and the technical and professional head of the Civil Division of the Office of the Attorney General.

She served on several government and corporate boards, including the State Enterprises Audit Corporation, the National Council on Women and Development, Ghana Airways Corporation, the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC) and the Aburi Girls' Secondary School Management Committee, and chaired the Ghana Civil Aviation Authority and Africa Timber and Plywood Limited, Ghana. She retired from the Attorney-General's Department in 1997 and served as Chairperson of the Lands Commission from 1999 to 2001. A bona fide member of the Ghana Bar Association and the epitome of professionalism, she had a long and distinguished career as a lawyer and public servant.

FIDA-Ghana

Ghana's First Women Lawyers' Association

Established in 1974 by a coalition of Ghanaian women lawyers who sought to use the law to improve the lives of women and children, FIDA-Ghana is Ghana's first female lawyers' association. It is a non-profit, non-partisan organisation committed to using the law to address discriminatory practices and to promote and protect the rights of women and children in Ghana.

Its notable endeavours include:

• Establishing, in 1985, Ghana's first legal aid programme, under which volunteer lawyers offer counselling, settlement, mediation and court representation to indigent clients, primarily women and children.
• Spearheading gender-sensitive law reforms on domestic violence, child custody, inheritance and spousal property rights, and playing a key role in the promulgation of Ghana's Domestic Violence Act, Persons with Disability Act and Affirmative Action Act.
• Providing a haven for distressed women, mothers and children who previously did not know where to seek help for legal problems.
• Creating rights awareness among women through public education clinics, seminars, workshops and educational materials in various Ghanaian languages.
• Partnering with other civil society organisations to strengthen protection for women and girls and to document cases reported to the Domestic Violence and Victims Support Unit (DOVVSU).

For almost half a century this pioneering organisation has blazed the trail, using legal aid, education and literacy, research, rights advocacy, an intergenerational community of lawyers and strategic partnerships to improve the lives of many women and children in Ghana. For its tremendously impactful public service through the law, this award is presented to the International Federation of Women Lawyers, Ghana (FIDA-Ghana).