Dr Gifty Edila

Dr Gifty Edila was born in 1955 in the Gold Coast, now Ghana, and moved to the United Kingdom aged 11, attending a private school in Ghana before continuing her education at Hampstead School in London. She went on to earn a Bachelor of Laws from the University of London and a Master of Laws from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Edila qualified as a barrister and became a member of Inner Temple, later training as a Solicitor Advocate and also qualifying to the Nigerian Bar. She built her career primarily in public law, working at North Kensington and Camden law centres before moving into senior local authority legal roles at Newham Council, Hackney Council, and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

As a local authority Legal Director, Edila led award-winning legal teams across all three councils, and became the only local government Legal Director to win the triple crown of recognition from The Lawyer magazine, the Local Government Chronicle and the Municipal Journal — a distinction that reflected sustained excellence across an entire career rather than a single case or campaign.

She has been separately recognised by both the Black Solicitors Network and the Excel Ghana Professionals Awards, and has written about her career in her book Defying Expectations: The Extraordinary Journey of a Black Woman Lawyer, documenting the barriers she navigated across three decades in British public law.