Ivor Agyeman-Duah

Currently, Agyeman-Duah is a Project Lead /Manager on one of ACET- Norwegian Agency for International Development Cooperation and World Bank's projects- the Strategic Partnership for Private Sector Development & Growth. He is also engaged in technical economic policy work on development in Rwanda, which country is the setting of his fictional story "The Good Ones". He has been a Centenary Research Associate in Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, and a Governing Member of the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board. Between 2017 and 2018, he served as a Strategic Development Policy Advisor for the Institute for Fiscal Studies in Accra, Ghana, on structural evaluations for fiscal policy advocacy.

In 2017, he was co-convenor (with SOAS) for the 55th anniversary of the Makerere Conference of African Writers in Uganda, the historic congregation in 1962 of post-colonial literary giants who, as described by Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong'o, were "united by a vision of the possibilities of a different future for Africa."

Also active in literary and cultural fields, Agyeman-Duah has written or edited many publications – including 2014's Crucible of the Ages: Essays in Honour of Wole Soyinka at 80, a book described as "a timely volume with majestic, priceless and supreme intellectual importance", featuring contributors including Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Nadine Gordimer, Margaret Busby, Toni Morrison, Ama Ata Aidoo, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Kwame Anthony Appiah, Ali Mazrui, Derek Walcott, Atukwei Okai, Cameron Duodu, Toyin Falola, Osei Tutu II (king of Asante), John Mahama and fThabo Mbeki. Agyeman-Duah serves as Development Policy Advisor for the Lagos-based Lumina Foundation, which established the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa, and he was the 2014–15 Chair of the Literature Jury of the Millennium Excellence Foundation.

In 2014, he was executive producer of two Soyinka stage plays, Ake: The Years of Childhood and Childe Internationale. Agyeman-Duah was also co-curator in 2004 (with art historian Kwaku Fosu Ansa and Myrtis Beddla) in Washington, DC of the exhibition Ancient Traditions and Contemporary Forms. He previously served on the international board of the Pan-African Historical Theatre Project (Panafest).

From 2010 to 2012, he was Director of the Alliance for Africa Foundation based in Accra, an international non-governmental organization set up by the Milan City Council, Lombardy Regional Government and Expo 2015 of Italy that looked at education and infrastructure development, including feasibility of the redevelopment of the cocoa industry in Liberia.

From 2009 to 2014 he was special advisor to President John Agyekum Kufuor on international development cooperation, and in this capacity worked with the World Food Programme in Kenya and Ethiopia and the Geneva-based international peacebuilding organization Interpeace. He has done work for the World Bank and World Bank Institute in Washington, DC. Agyeman-Duah was formerly head of Public Affairs at the Ghana Embassy in Washington, DC, and later Culture and Communication Advisor at the Ghana High Commission in London, and has been a consulting fellow of the African Center for Economic Transformation. He has also held fellowships at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University and been a Hilary and Trinity resident scholar at Exeter College, Oxford.

He was part of a team of scholars, policy makers and development specialists of the African Studies and Research Forum in Washington, DC, that was put together to assess US President George W. Bush's Africa foreign policy, subsequently published as Assessing George Bush's Africa’s Policy and Suggestions for Barack Obama (Bloomington, Indiana: i Universe, 2009) and Assessing Barack Obama’s Africa's policy (American University Press, 2011).

He has worked on many international projects between 2005 and 2014 as a Member of a network that looked at the role of the African Diaspora in economic development at the World Bank Institute in Washington, DC, and part of a team for the Bank's capacity building for traditional authority project on heritage economics.

Agyeman-Duah was the inaugural curator of The John A Kufuor Museum and Presidential Library and part of the team that negotiated its infrastructural development at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi and at the University of Ghana, Legon. As well as being in the policy and scholarship spheres, Agyeman-Duah also had a distinguished career in theatre arts and journalism. He wrote for the London-based Panos Institute, West Africa, New African and edited Some African Voices of Our Time (2002), an anthology of conversations with African writers.

He wrote, co-directed and produced two television documentary films – Yaa Asantewaa: The Exile of King Prempeh and the Heroism of an African Queen, premiered in Ghana in 2001, and The Return of a King to Seychelles, which was shown at Chatham House in 2015. Agyeman-Duah was also historical consultant to Margaret Busby's 2001 theatrical production about Yaa Asantewaa (Yaa Asantewaa – Warrior Queen).

Ivor Agyeman-Duah (born 1966) is a Ghanaian academic, economist, writer, editor and film director. He has worked in Ghana's diplomatic service and has served as an advisor on development policy.

Ivor Agyeman-Duah was born in Kumasi, Ghana, in 1966, and was named after his father's friend, the British historian Ivor Wilks.

Together with Lucy Newlyn, a professor emeritus at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford, Agyeman-Duah was co-campaigner in Soyinka's electoral contest in the Oxford Professorship of Poetry appointment. Though they failed notwithstanding support from global icons such as former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, former Director of Liberty, Baroness Chakrabari, of Kennington, the Poet Laureate of US, Rita Dove, the Booker Prize laureate Ben Okri OBE, and the British-Jamaican poet Benjamin Zephaniah, their campaign strategies and concerns were published as May Their Shadows Never Shrink – Wole Soyinka and the Oxford Professorship of Poetry. It partly analyses why the other black St. Lucian Nobel poet Derek Walcott withdrew from the same contest years earlier and implies that the post or appointment is more British, since Joseph Trapp an English poet and Anglican clergyman first won it in 1708, than international.