Amina Mohammed was born in Liverpool, UK, in 1961 to a Nigerian veterinarian-officer and a Britishnurse. She is the eldest of five daughters. Mohamed attended a primary school in Kaduna and Maiduguri, and Buchan School in Isle of Man. She further attended Henley Management College in 1989. After she finished her studies her father demanded she return to Nigeria.
Career
Between 1981 and 1991, Mohamed worked with Archcon Nigeria, an architectural design firm in association with Norman and Dawbarn United Kingdom. In 1991, she founded Afri-Projects Consortium, and from 1991 to 2001 she was its Executive Director. From 2002 until 2005, Mohammed coordinated the Task Force on Gender and Education for the United Nations Millennium Project. Mohammed later acted as the Senior Special Assistant to the President of Nigeria on the Millennium Development Goals. In 2005, she was charged with the coordination of Nigeria's debt relief funds toward the achievement of the MDGs. Her mandate included designing a Virtual Poverty Fund with innovative approaches to poverty reduction, budget coordination and monitoring, as well as providing advice on pertinent issues regarding poverty, public sector reform and sustainable development.
Mohammed later became the Founder and CEO of the Center for Development Policy Solutions and as an Adjunct Professor for the Master's in Development Practice program at Columbia University. During that time, she served on numerous international advisory boards and panels, including the UN Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Post-2015 Development Agenda and the Independent Expert Advisory Group on the Data Revolution for Sustainable Development. She also chaired the Advisory Board of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural OrganizationGlobal Monitoring Report on Education. From 2012, Mohammed was a key player in the Post-2015 Development Agenda process, serving as the Special Adviser to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Post-2015 development planning. In this role, she acted as the link between the Secretary-General, his High Level Panel of Eminent Persons, and the General Assembly’s Open Working Group, among other stakeholders. From 2014, she also served on the Secretary-General's Independent Expert Advisory Group on the Data Revolution for Sustainable Development.
Mohammed served as Federal Minister of Environment in the cabinet of PresidentMuhammadu Buhari from November 2015 to February 2017. During that time, she was Nigeria's representative in the African Union Reform Steering Committee, chaired by Paul Kagame. She resigned from the Nigerian Federal Executive Council on 24 February 2017. In 2017, Mohammed was accused of participation in a Chinese scam to illegally import endangered Nigerian rosewood during her term as Nigeria's environment minister. The Nigerian government has denied the claims.
