Kwamena Ahwoi

Kwamena Ahwoi is a lawyer and governance scholar who designed much of Ghana's local government system as Minister for Local Government and Rural Development from 1990 to 2001. He was born in Kumasi on 13 October 1951.

He went to Okuapeman School and Opoku Ware School, studied law at the University of Ghana from 1971 to 1974 and took a Bachelor of Civil Law at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He was lecturing at Legon on 31 December 1981 when Jerry Rawlings summoned him to Gondar Barracks, and he became a special aide to the PNDC chairman.

Under the PNDC and the NDC government he ran revenue investigations, helped draft the "Blue Book" that created the district assemblies, and was Secretary and later Minister for Local Government, also acting as foreign minister at times, including in 1997. He later returned to teaching and is a governance professor at GIMPA. His memoir, Working with Rawlings, is one of several books he has written on decentralisation and politics. He is married with four children.