Margaret Aku Okorie

Nigerian educator who established the first girls' boarding school in West Africa and pioneered STEM education for women

Margaret Aku Okorie (1908-1997) transformed educational opportunities for women in Nigeria by founding the Okorie Girls' College in 1943 - the first boarding school in West Africa dedicated to girls' education. Born to a Igbo family that valued education, she defied cultural norms by completing a degree in mathematics at the University of London (1932), becoming one of Nigeria's first female university graduates.

Her visionary school curriculum emphasized science, technology, and leadership, producing over 10,000 graduates by 1970 including future Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka's mother. Okorie developed the Problem-Based Learning method in 1955, which predated modern pedagogical frameworks by decades. She also established the West African Women's Scholarship Fund (1960) that supported 500+ women in higher education.

Okorie's 1968 publication Breaking the Chains: Education as Liberation became a seminal text in feminist education theory. She collaborated with UNESCO to create teacher training programs across 12 African countries, influencing regional educational policies. Her work inspired the Nigerian government's 1975 decision to mandate girls' education through secondary level.

Explore her archives at Nigerian Educational Heritage and watch the 2019 documentary The Calculus of Liberation on her life's work.