Dr. Abiba Zakariah

Dr. Abiba Zakariah serves as a board member of the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority, the Ghanaian public institution responsible for licensing drivers, registering vehicles, and enforcing the country's road transport regulatory framework. The DVLA sits at the intersection of public safety, transport policy, and digital service delivery, making its governance demands both broad and substantive.

Over the past decade, the DVLA has pursued a significant digital transformation agenda, moving licensing and registration processes online, introducing biometric systems, and working to reduce fraud in vehicle documentation. These changes have placed increasing demands on board-level oversight, requiring directors who can engage meaningfully with questions of technology governance, public accountability, and institutional reform. Dr. Zakariah's background, as signalled by her doctoral qualification, positions her to contribute to these discussions at the governance level.

The DVLA's mandate also carries important implications for road safety in Ghana, where traffic fatality rates remain high by international standards. Board oversight of the authority's licensing standards, enforcement mechanisms, and public education initiatives has a direct, if often invisible, bearing on road safety outcomes across the country. Directors who bring analytical rigour and a commitment to institutional quality to their board roles contribute to outcomes that affect millions of Ghanaians who use the road network daily.

Dr. Zakariah's inclusion in the 2026 Avance Media Top 100 Women Board Directors ranking reflects her standing within Ghana's corporate governance community. The ranking, which surveyed board compositions across 100 of Ghana's leading public and private sector organisations, identified her as among the most significant women in Ghanaian boardrooms. The fact that women now hold 25.9 percent of board seats across the surveyed organisations, while representing progress from earlier baselines, also underscores how much ground remains to be covered in achieving genuine gender parity at governance level.

Her work at the DVLA represents the kind of public sector board service that rarely attracts the attention that corporate board roles do, but that matters enormously to the quality of governance across Ghana's state institutions.