Lesley Lokko Called One of The BBC's 100 Most Influential Women

In 2024, the BBC released a list of the 100 Most Influential Women. This time, the women who made the list are women worldwide who are driving change “through their resilience” in their respective fields. Lesley Lokko, an architect born in Dundee, Scotland, and raised in Accra, Ghana, is one of the BBC's 100 Most Influential Women of 2024. 

Besides being an architect, Lesley Lokko is also an academic writer and curator. Lokko is committed to diversity and focuses on global challenges such as decolonization and decarbonization. Her passion is reflected in her innovative work in architectural education. 

While at Oxford University, Lokko studied Hebrew and Arabic. She studied sociology, law, and architecture, earning her degree from the Bartlett School of Architecture in 1992 and returning to Ghana in 2000. Lesley Lokko also studied creative writing and earned her doctorate through a practice-based approach.

Lesley Lokko is committed to re-adapting architectural education to open up discussion around identity, equality, and race by building educational institutions. In 2015, she founded Africa's first graduate school of architecture at the University of Johannesburg. Then, in 2021, she established the African Futures Institute (AFI) in Accra, a pan-African think tank. In 2024, she will even launch a nomadic studio in Morocco to expand the field of architecture with a focus on migration and Maghrebi identity. 

The Ghanaian-Scottish architect was also awarded the 2024 Royal Gold Medal by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), making her the first African woman to receive this prestigious award. Lokko also made history as the first African woman curator of the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2023. Under the “Laboratory of the Future,” she conveyed the importance of decolonization and environmental sustainability in the field of architecture. 

Lokko's edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale (Photograph by Lizzie Crook)

Lesley Lokko's career can serve as an example of an influential figure in the field of education and design with her courage to challenge conventional architectural norms. Lokko reflects her resilience and her ability to make a difference in the field of architecture. “Resilience is the capacity to persist over the long term - even in the face of indifference, which is often harder to bear than opposition,” Lokko was quoted as saying by the BBC.