11
outstanding black women made the list of Forbes’ 100 Most Powerful, these women
of class, power, money and intelligence deserve our commendation. The
interesting part is, Nigerian women made the list!
Forbes’ recently released its ranking of the 100 most powerful women in the world, a list filled with heads of state, CEOs and entrepreneurs, philanthropists, and influential entertainers all ranked by dollars, media influence, and overall impact. Eleven black women made the rank of the 2015 list.
Forbes’ recently released its ranking of the 100 most powerful women in the world, a list filled with heads of state, CEOs and entrepreneurs, philanthropists, and influential entertainers all ranked by dollars, media influence, and overall impact. Eleven black women made the rank of the 2015 list.
10. Michelle Obama
Michelle
Obama, wife of President Barak Obama, makes the list due to her influence in
policy making both nation and worldwide. At the beginning of this year she
travelled to Southeast Asia to support an
initiative to improve the education of girls and the financial stability of
young women. She’s also been integral in the Obama administration’s effort to
end homelessness among veterans in the U.S. and fought measures that would
allow some schools to opt out of the federal dietary standards for school
lunches.
12. Oprah Winfrey
Oprah is no
stranger to the most powerful ranking. Her cable network, OWN has proven
successful despite the naysayers and she still makes millions each year from
the spin-off stars she helped launch to fame including Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz.
Winfrey’s movie imprint, Harpo Films co-produced the well received Martin
Luther King, Jr. biopic Selma and she also played a small role as civil rights
activist Annie Lee Cooper. She is still the sole African-American woman on the
Forbes’ 400 Richest Americans list, and she puts her money to good use by
donating hundreds of millions of dollars to educational causes.
21. Beyoncé Knowles
Beyoncé
makes the cut as the highest ranked entertainer on the Powerful Women list. Her
tour with husband Jay Z last summer grossed approximately $100 million for 19
shows throughout North America , and she
herself has pulled in more than $500 million in earnings as a solo artist.
29. Ursula Burns
Burns
helped Xerox, where she began her career in 1980 as a summer intern, generate
$21.4 billion in revenue this past year as CEO, and has helped keep the company
viable and profitable in an increasingly paperless world. She has told
shareholders that she plans to continue to increase the company’s
technology-driven and service-led portfolio.
34. Loretta Lynch
Lynch is
the first African American woman in U.S. history to be sworn in as
Attorney General. She has expanded President Obama’s proposed plan for police
body cameras with a $20 million dollar program proposal of her own and has
sworn to “vigorously prosecute all those who tilt the economic system in their
favor,” including recently fining five major banks for rate rigging.
47. Ertharin Cousin
Cousin
serves as the head of the UN World Food Programme, the world’s largest program
for battling food insecurity and hunger. Cousin herself was raised in a low
income neighborhood in Chicago
and has stated that her goal is to eliminate hunger in her lifetime. The World
Food Programme aids in this battle not just through handing out food during
crises, but also by helping with food production and child malnourishment.
48. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala
Okonjo-Iweala
was the minister of finance for Nigeria
and has helped the country’s economy grow an average of 6% annually over three
years. She’s also helped develop reform programs to improve governmental
transparency.She is the first woman to serve as the country’s finance minister
and spent 21 years as a economist at the World Bank.
65. Rosalind Brewer
Became the
first woman and first African-American to lead a Walmart division when she took
over as Sam’s Club CEO in 2012. She has introduced new measures to compete with
other big-box stores such as a private health insurance exchange and access to
payroll systems and legal services through Sam’s Club membership. She serves on
the board of Lockheed Martin and is chair on the board of trustees for her alma
mater Spelman College .
87. Folorunsho Alakija
Alakija is
the richest self-made woman in Africa and one
of only two female billionaires on the continent. Her first company was an
upscale fashion label catering to Nigerian elites. This helped her develop a
connection with the former military president, Ibrahim Babangida, who later
gave her company a prospecting license for one of Nigeria ’s most lucrative oil
fields.
92. Risa Lavizzo-Mourey
Lavizzo-Mourey
oversees the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the largest charitable foundation
in the U.S.
exclusively dedicated to health. Lavizzo-Mourey, who has an MD from Harvard and
an MBA from Wharton, has a focus on improving access to quality healthcare and
addressing socio-economic factors affecting health.
96. Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf
Johnson-Sirleaf,
president of Liberia for
nine years now, was in charge for the devastating Ebola outbreak that ravaged West Africa . Though she has overseen economic growth for
the county, Liberia
is still one of the world’s most impoverished nations and the need for
modernization to infrastructure, education, and healthcare systems all impacted
the growing crisis in the country. Her decision to use troops to quarantine
heavily infected neighborhoods was widely criticized, but Liberia managed
to quell the outbreak and achieve zero cases to become the first nation to wipe
out the disease a year after recording its first case.
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