Adaugo Pamela Nwakanma

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Adaugo Pamela Nwakanma is a PhD candidate at Harvard University in the Department of Government with a secondary field in the Department of African and African American Studies. She researches and teaches the political economy of gender and development in various emerging economies, with particular emphasis on Africa and the African diaspora.

Nwakanma is completing her dissertation on the intersection of women’s empowerment in business and politics. More specifically, she examines the role of social networks in moderating the relationship between economic power and political power among entrepreneurs in diverse sectors of the Nigerian economy. 

Nwakanma received her BA in international studies and economics with a secondary field in linguistics from the UC San Diego in 2014. She has won various teaching and research awards and received an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant though the American Political Science Association. She has published “Women, Entrepreneurship, and Economic Development in Africa” in The Palgrave Handbook of African Women’s Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and a chapter on multicultural identities and decolonizing academia, titled “On Scholarship and the Hyphenated African Identity,” in African Scholars and Intellectuals in North American Academies: Reflections on Exile and Migration (Routledge, 2020).