From a royal family
Okonjo-Iweala comes from a royal family. She was born in 1954 in Ogwashi-Ukwu, Delta State, Nigeria where her father Professor Chukwuka Okonjo was the King from the Obahai Royal Family of Ogwashi-Ukwu. Her parents were both professors at the University of Ibadan.
When she was nine, she went to live with her grandmother because her parents were in abroad schooling. In a BBC interview, she said: “They were gone for almost a decade before I really saw them and knew them. I did everything a village girl would do, fetch water, go to the farm with my grandmother all the chores, I saw what poverty meant, to be poor at first hand.”
