Joana is a young resilient Ghanaian who is gradually charting a course in international leadership and global development by engaging in roles that enable her to learn, participate, contribute and experience the uniqueness of international careers and opportunities to make a global yet local impact. She is a Young Diplomat of Ghana where she trained initially as an ambassador for the SDGs, a YALI fellow (Public Policy and Management Track) and was a delegate for Honduras in the UNEP committee during the just ended Ghana International Model UN (GIMUN 2018) in Accra. Joana works with the Ghana Netherlands Business and Culture Council as a Project Officer and holds a
Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration from Central University (Ghana) where she served as the Treasurer of the Student Chaplaincy Committee. During her studies, her passion for sustainability saw her through the attempt for Sustainability Accounting to explore ways by which companies would benefit by accounting for their sustainable footprints throughout their operations and also led a team of ten to pursue an entrepreneurial project on ‘Campus farms’ in an attempt to help achieve the SDG 2. She is an enthusiastic motivator with a contagious positive attitude seeking to make a significant impact in the areas of global leadership, sustainable development and global partnerships for development, whilst upholding integrity, her Christian faith, and excellence as her guiding principles. She possesses the drive to grow intellectually and emotionally, a service-orientation to contribute to society and loves opportunities that foster her strengths, address areas of development and prepare her for leadership to work across all spheres of global society.
She has ceased several opportunities to lead, to learn and to develop volunteering as a teaching assistant in Tema Ridge Basic School where she assisted in educating young children in different learning subjects. She also ceased the opportunity to utilize and develop her analytical and entrepreneurial skills in 2015 New Business Challenge in which she worked in the Netherlands and Ghana in a transcultural team involving Ghanaian and Dutch duo and successfully developed a financially and technically sustainable business model for Susteq on Water Business Box, as a profitable solution to water issues in certain areas in Ghana.
She loves to travel, experience people and different cultures and values the lessons of teamwork, team leadership, and team experience.
Joana believes that opportunities do not come once but constantly in different forms, but are only beneficial to the ones who see it, are prepared for it and are courageous enough to take advantage of it by action.