Patrick Awuah

Patrick Gyimah Awuah Jr. was born in 1965 in Ghana and grew up in Accra, attending the prestigious Achimota School. As a teenager he left for the United States to study at Swarthmore College, earning degrees in engineering and economics and graduating in 1989.

Awuah then joined Microsoft in Seattle, working as an engineer and later a program manager from 1989 to 1997. He saw a sharp contrast between the critical thinking and problem solving he had experienced at an American liberal arts college and the rote learning common in Ghana's universities, and decided he wanted to return home.

He left Microsoft and enrolled at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, where his MBA project became a business plan for a new university. Alongside fellow students he travelled to Ghana for a feasibility study, and in 1999 he graduated and moved his family back to Ghana.

In 2002 Awuah founded Ashesi University, a private, not-for-profit institution in Accra built around a liberal arts curriculum, ethical principles and skills for contemporary African needs. The name Ashesi means beginning in Akan. Ashesi introduced an honour code for examinations in 2008, a radical idea in Ghana, and its students elected the first female university student government president in the country in 2006.

In 2015 Awuah became a MacArthur Fellow, the first Ghanaian to win the award, and has been named a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, a TED Fellow and one of Fortune's greatest leaders. In 2025 he was named a Sunhak Peace Prize laureate for his impact in education.