Abenaa Akuamoa-Boateng

Executive Director

Abenaa Akuamoa-Boateng, Executive Director of WomenStrong International

Prior to the establishment of Women’s Health to Wealth, from 2006 – 2014, Mme. Abenaa Akuamoa-Boateng was the Millennium Cities Initiative’s Regional Coordinator for West and Central Africa and Project Manager for Kumasi, Ghana. There she developed strategic alliances between the local, regional and national government and the business community to support the implementation of interventions in water and sanitation, health, education, gender equity and private sector development. Abenaa was a central force in establishing the Kumasi City Investment Promotion Unit and organized local, national and international Kumasi Investment Days that engendered the establishment of three projects that now provide additional employment and revenue for the city.

In collaboration with the Government of Israel and Ben Gurion University, Akuamoa-Boateng helped reduce neonatal mortality across the Ashanti region by designing, building and training staff to operate two model, low-resource neonatal units that are now being studied and emulated in the Volta region, the national capital and beyond. With the American Academy of Pediatrics, Johnson & Johnson and the NGO AmeriCares, Abenaa has helped upgrade the knowledge and skills of hundreds of service providers in neonatal resuscitation and essential newborn care, leading to a 21% decongestion last year of the intensive care neonatal unit at the region’s only tertiary care hospital and an 11% drop in neonatal mortality in the Kumasi district.

Prior to her work at Millennium Cities, Abenaa worked for 21 years as a senior nutritionist in the Public Health Unit at the national Ministry of Health and for 18 years headed Nutrition Services for Ashanti, Ghana’s most populous region. She was a key player in the Quality Protein Maize Program, an integrated rural agricultural development program jointly supported by Sasakawa Global 2000 and the Government of Ghana. Abenaa pioneered, designed and supported the implementation of a nutritional component of the program, which is still operational in 16 sub-Saharan countries. Mme. Akuamoa-Boateng served as a member of the UN Millennium Project Task Force on Hunger between 2003-2005.

Abenaa earned her MSc in reproductive biology from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, her Bachelor of Science from the University of Ghana – Legon, holds a postgraduate diploma in maternal and child health from IAC in the Netherlands and is an alumnus of UC Berkeley Beahrs Environmental Leadership Program.

Read [more](https://www.womenstrong.org/stories/146-beboldforchange-abenaa-akuamoa-boateng) about how Abenaa became the powerful woman she is today. And listen to Abenaa talk about Women’s Health to Wealth and how she came to found it here: