W. Paatii Ofosu-Amaah

W. Paatii Ofosu-Amaah was a lawyer who spent thirty years at the World Bank, rising to Vice President and Corporate Secretary from 2003 to 2007. He was born in Accra on 13 July 1950 and died on 13 April 2016.

He went to Adisadel College, took his law degree at the University of Ghana at twenty and an LLM at Harvard Law School in 1972. He worked as an associate at Davis Polk and Wardwell in New York and as a legal officer with the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome.

He joined the World Bank in 1978 and oversaw the legal side of hundreds of projects across Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe. As its legal adviser on the environment he represented the Bank in global environmental treaty talks from 1986 to 1991 and helped set up the Global Environment Facility, and he drafted the constitution of the African Capacity Building Foundation. He served as acting general counsel, and as corporate secretary sat on the committees that chose Paul Wolfowitz and Robert Zoellick as president. From 2008 to 2015 he advised Donald Kaberuka at the African Development Bank, and he sat on the African Union panel led by Thabo Mbeki on Sudan and South Sudan.