Ms. Elsie Addo Awadzi is currently the inaugural Visiting Fellow - Women in Public Leadership, at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. She is a multi-disciplinary professional and high-impact leader with 30 years of professional experience working in various capacities in Africa and internationally. Her experience spans economic governance, international financial institutions, financial regulation and crisis management, law, and finance.

Until recently, she served as a Deputy Governor of the Bank of Ghana for seven years, making her the second woman to occupy that office in the Bank’s 68-year history and the first woman on the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee since its establishment in 2002. During Elsie’s term as Deputy Governor, she led major reforms that helped to strengthen the banking system, including managing a systemic banking crisis, leading the design, designing and enforcing new governance and risk management rules for banks, and reforming the Bank of Ghana’s supervisory competency and culture. 

Before her appointment as Deputy Governor, she worked with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington D.C. for six years where she advised several IMF member countries on the design and implementation of effective frameworks for the regulation and supervision of banks, financial crisis management, and fiscal governance (fiscal responsibility, sovereign wealth funds governance, public debt management, and public financial management). Before joining the IMF in 2012, she held various portfolios in Ghana including as a Commissioner of Ghana’s Securities & Exchange Commission for six years where she played a key role in designing policies, rules, surveillance and enforcement mechanisms for Ghana’s then nascent capital market. She also consulted extensively for local and foreign businesses, private equity/venture capital funds, public sector clients, and development partners. She founded and managed a boutique corporate and investment law firm in 2002 which she sold in 2011. Her earlier career saw her working in corporate law and a brief stint in banking (treasury operations).

She holds post-graduate academic qualifications from Georgetown University Law Center in Washington D.C. (LL.M - International Business & Economic Law - 2012); University of Ghana Business School (M.B.A. Finance - 2000), Ghana School of Law (Qualifying Certificate in Law - 1995), and the University of Ghana Law Faculty (LL.B - 1993).  

She holds Executive Certificates in “Women and Power” from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University (April 2025), and in Executive Public Leadership from the Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government (July 2022)