Born | 1945 |
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Nationality | Ghana |
Institution | American University |
Field | Political economics |
Alma mater | University of Manitoba University of Western Ontario University of Ghana |
George Ayittey (born 1945) is a Ghanaian economist, author and president of the Free Africa Foundation in Washington DC. He is a professor at American University,[1] and an associate scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.[2] He has championed the argument that "Africa is poor because she is not free", that the primary cause of African poverty is less a result of the oppression and mismanagement by colonial powers, but rather a result of modern oppressive native autocrats. He also goes beyond criticism to advocate for specific ways to address the abuses of the past and present; specifically he calls for democratic government, debt reexamination, modernized infrastructure, free market economics, and free trade to promote development.
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Ayittey holds a B.Sc. in Economics from the University of Ghana, Legon, an M.A. from the University of Western Ontario in Canada, and a Ph.D. from the University of Manitoba. He has taught at Wayne State College and Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania. He held a National Fellowship at the Hoover Institution in 1988-89, and then joined The Heritage Foundation as a Bradley Resident Scholar.[2] He founded The Free Africa Foundation in 1993, to serve as a catalyst for reform in Africa.[3] In 2008 Dr. Ayittey was listed by Foreign Policy as one of the "Top 100 Public Intellectuals" who "are shaping the tenor of our time".[4] He lives in Lorton, Virginia.
Ayittey believes there are three keys to successfully rescuing Africa from oppressive despotism: