Meet Ghana’s first female Supreme Court Judge and only lady Speaker of Parliament

In a world where women are the marginalized group in the gender equation, there have been several stories of women beating the odds and writing their names in history by achieving high feats.

Ghana’s history is filled with such women whose efforts and work have helped shape the country in many ways. One of such women is Joyce Adeline Bamford-Addo.

Born in 1937 to an English father and a Ghanaian mother from Aburi, Joyce Bamford-Addo attended St. Mary’s Boarding School and Our Lady of Apostles (OLA) Boarding School in Cape Coast for her basic education.

She later attended Holy Child School, in Cape Coast, for her secondary education and proceeded to the United Kingdom for legal training. She joined the Inner Temple to train under the apprenticeship system known as Inns of court and was called to the English Bar in 1961.

After returning to Ghana from the United Kingdom, she started her legal career, Justice Bamford-Addo served as Assistant State Attorney in 1963 and was promoted to State Attorney, then subsequently promoted to become a Senior State Attorney before becoming a Principal State Attorney.

She rose to become Chief State Attorney in 1973 and was appointed Director of Public Prosecutions in 1976, a position she held for ten years.

In 1991, during the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) era, Bamford-Addo became the Second Deputy Speaker of Ghana’s Consultative Assembly set up to draft what became the 1992 constitution.

She attained the enviable feat of becoming the first and only female speaker in Ghana’s parliamentary history as the speaker of the Parliament of Ghana between 2009 and 2013, having previously served as a judge in the Supreme Court of Ghana.

Before becoming a speaker, Joyce Bamford-Addo’s appointment to the Supreme Court made her the first female to assume a seat on the bench at the apex court of Ghana, where she served from 1991 to her retirement in 2004.

She was a known advocate for women’s empowerment and demonstrated same in many conferences, meetings and workshops both locally and internationally.

Her election as the first female speaker also made her the second female to head an arm of government after Georgina Theodora Wood was appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Ghana.

Her election also made her the highest-ranked female in Ghana’s political history, surpassing Georgina Theodora Woods.

She joined the roll of other female speakers like Betty Boothroyd in the United Kingdom and Nancy Pelosi of the United States of America as the first female speakers of their respective countries.