Joyce Bamford-Addo

Joyce Adeline Bamford-Addo is a lawyer and judge who became the first woman on Ghana's Supreme Court in 1991 and the first female Speaker of Parliament, from 2009 to 2013. She was born in Accra in 1937 to an English father and a mother from Aburi.

She went to Holy Child School in Cape Coast and trained as a barrister at the Inner Temple, being called to the English bar in 1961 and the Ghanaian bar in 1962. She rose through the Attorney-General's department to Chief State Attorney and was Director of Public Prosecutions for ten years from 1976. In 1991 she was Second Deputy Speaker of the Consultative Assembly that drafted the 1992 Constitution, and President Rawlings appointed her to the Supreme Court. She retired from the bench in 2004.

After the 2008 election she was elected Speaker unopposed, the first woman to hold the post in West Africa. President Mills gave her the Companion of the Order of the Volta in 2011. She is a Catholic.