Amina Mohamed: Skilled diplomat
Kenyan Sports, Culture and Heritage Minister Amina Mohamed is a lawyer, diplomat and politician who has vast public service experience at the national and international levels.
“She has been an important player in Kenya’s multilateral negotiations in bodies like the Commonwealth and the World Trade Organization,” according to the book Muslim Women in Postcolonial Kenya, which noted “her skills in economic and commercial diplomacy.”
Mohamed, who is from an ethnic Somali family, also held the position of foreign minister from 2013 to 2018, becoming the first woman to hold this position and the first Muslim woman in Kenya’s Cabinet.
Last Friday, she was officially admitted to the state bar.
The 58-year-old, who speaks English, Russian and Swahili, rose through the ranks in Kenya’s diplomatic service to become Kenya’s ambassador to the WTO and, in 2005, the first woman to chair the WTO’s General Council.
Mohamed is a a former assistant secretary-general of the United Nations and deputy executive director of the UN Environment Program’s Africa Office, in Nairobi.
She received a master’s of law National University of Kyiv, in Ukraine, and later a postgraduate diploma in international relations at the University of Oxford.
Mohamed ran for the WTO director-general position in 2013, but lost to Azevedo. He was reelected in 2017 as the sole candidate.
