Esther Afua Ocloo

Esther Afua Ocloo was born Esther Afua Nkulenu on the eighteenth of April 1919 in Peki Dzake, in what is now the Volta Region of Ghana, the daughter of George Nkulenu, a blacksmith, and Georgina, a potter and farmer. Schooled first at the mission schools of Peki, she went on scholarship to Achimota School, where she took the Cambridge School Certificate.

Her enterprise began with less than a pound — the accounts say six to ten shillings. With it she bought oranges, sugar, and firewood, and made a dozen jars of marmalade; Achimota School became her first standing contract, and then the army. From that beginning grew Nkulenu Industries, founded in 1942–43 and remembered as the first food-processing business in the Gold Coast — a house that presses orange and palm nut to this day. In England from 1949 she earned the Good Housekeeping Institute's cooking diploma, its first African graduate, and studied food preservation at Bristol's research station before carrying the science home.

She organized the first Made-in-Ghana exhibition in 1958 and the next year was elected the first president of the Federation of Ghana Industries. At the first United Nations World Conference on Women, in Mexico City in 1975, she pressed a conviction learned in her own kitchen: that the surest help for a poor woman is capital in her own hands. From it, with Michaela Walsh and Ela Bhatt, she co-founded Women's World Banking, incorporated in 1979, and served as the first chair of its trustees — a house of lending that has since reached millions of women. In 1990 she became the first African woman awarded the Africa Prize for Leadership, and turned her share of it into a school for farm skills.

She died of pneumonia in Accra on the eighth of February 2002, at eighty-two, and was carried home to Peki Dzake. Honored be Auntie Ocloo, who turned twelve jars of marmalade into bread for millions.