Patrick Awuah Jr.

Patrick Awuah Jr. is a Ghanaian educator and former Microsoft engineer who founded Ashesi University, a private liberal arts university in Ghana, and has led it as president since it opened in 2002. He was born in 1965 and grew up in Accra.

Achimota to Swarthmore

Awuah attended Achimota School, where he was a house prefect. He won a scholarship to Swarthmore College in the United States and graduated in 1989 with degrees in engineering and economics.

Microsoft

From 1989 to 1997 he worked at Microsoft near Seattle as a software engineer and later a program manager. He met his wife, Rebecca, a software test engineer, at the company. The birth of their first child pushed him to think about what kind of Ghana his children would grow up in, and he concluded that the country's universities were not training people to solve problems or lead ethically.

Building Ashesi

Awuah enrolled at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, where he and fellow students wrote the business plan for a new university, and he completed his MBA in 1999. That year he moved back to Ghana with his family. Ashesi opened in 2002 in rented premises in Accra, teaching business administration and computer science around a liberal arts core. It later moved to its own campus at Berekuso in the Eastern Region and added engineering. Its students sit exams under an honour code, which was unusual in West Africa when Ashesi introduced it.

Recognition

Ghana awarded him the Order of the Volta in 2007. He received the John P. McNulty Prize in 2009. In 2014 he won UC Berkeley's Elise and Walter A. Haas International Award and was a Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneur of the Year. In 2015 he was named a MacArthur Fellow, and Fortune ranked him 40th among the world's 50 greatest leaders. He won the WISE Prize for Education in 2017, and in 2025 he was named a laureate of the Sunhak Peace Prize.

Today

Awuah remains Ashesi's president. He delivered the president's address at the university's 2026 commencement under the theme "Let your life speak as you venture beyond the horizon."