Photo of Dr. Jarpa Dawuni, screenshot from Youtube video, ‘Women in Leadership: Professor J. Jarpa Dawuni’, by Center for Women, Gender and Global Leadership. Fair use.

“My name is Jarpa Dawuni, and I often shorten it as J. Jarpa because my first name is actually Josephine,” she explains. “But in an attempt to decolonize in every aspect, I hyphenated it — Josephine-Jarpa — and I use Jarpa, which is my ‘native’ or local name from Ghana.”

From the start, Dr. Jarpa Dawuni makes clear that identity for her is an act of agency. She resists being reduced to a single role. Smiling at the impossibility of being contained she says:

I would describe myself as a feminist, a womanist, a mother, an aunt, a social activist, a professor, a lawyer, and the list goes on.

That layered self-description is not a rhetorical flourish; it is the lived reality of a Ghanaian barrister turned political scientist, institution-builder at Howard University, and founder of the Institute for African Women in Law (IAWL). Across each role runs a consistent thread: the conviction that women’s voices belong at the center of law, leadership, and social transformation.

The matriarch’s legacy

Dawuni traces her first lessons in resistance and self-knowledge to her grandmother, the matriarch of her family. She recalls: “She had a strong sense of knowing who she was, knowing what was good for her, what she would stand up for, what she would not stand up for.” Though her grandmother had no formal education, she commanded authority and transmitted values of dignity and excellence to her children and grandchildren.

This legacy shaped how Dawuni understood activism: not as the work of elites, but as something embedded in family life and “part of the DNA.” She describes watching her grandmother’s spirit echoed in her mother, her aunties, and now in her own role as a mother and auntie.

Everybody has the power to be an activist — whether it flourishes often depends on the environment.

From law to scholarship

Her professional journey mirrors that conviction. Dawuni is a qualified barrister-at-law before the Ghana Superior Courts and holds a PhD in political science from Georgia State University. She went on to join Howard University, where she is now a Full Professor of Political Science. Her research spans judicial politics, women in the legal professions, gender and law, democratization, and international human rights.

What unites this range is her insistence on a gendered lens. She explains:

I can be a lawyer with a gendered lens, a development expert with a gendered lens, a political scientist with a gendered lens, and a professor with a gendered lens.

That orientation led her to notice a glaring silence in the literature: the absence of sustained work on African women in law.

I started looking into research on African women in law, and I really couldn’t find much. So I began to write.

The result has been a prolific and field-shaping body of work. She has also conducted fieldwork in more than ten African countries, as well as the United Kingdom and Brazil, documenting stories that otherwise would have remained invisible. She reflects:

I remembered Toni Morrison’s line: if there’s a book you want to read and it hasn’t been written, then you must write it. That’s what I did.

A social entrepreneur in academia

For Dawuni, research is only one side of her activism. “I call myself a social entrepreneur. I create stuff, I fill in gaps where there’s a gap.”

One of her proudest examples is at Howard University. When she arrived in 2015, she discovered there was no program devoted to women and gender studies. She began by organizing small initiatives — an International Women’s Day program here, a faculty collective there — but funding was scarce. Then one day the university president called: “Send me a proposal by 10 a.m. tomorrow.”

She laughs at the memory. “Less than 24 hours! But because I’d been percolating ideas for years, I sat down, didn’t sleep, and wrote the proposal.”

She initially asked for USD 30,000. The president suggested USD 250,000. By the time the negotiations concluded, she had secured USD 1 million — during the early months of the pandemic, no less. With that support, she founded the Center for Women, Gender, and Global Leadership, the first of its kind at Howard.

Her ability to translate vision into resources is part of a wider record: she has raised millions in grants and fellowships, including as Principal Investigator of a major National Science Foundation study on Black and Afro-descendant women judges. She has also been recognized internationally, receiving the Women in Law Academia International Award in Austria and the White House Presidential Award for her service on the board of the African Research Academies for Women.

Dr. Jarpa Dawuni holding a Justitia Award 2020. Photo by Dr. Jarpa Dawuni, used with permission.

Her lesson is clear:

Be prepared, so when the opportunity comes, you’re ready to hit gold. And don’t let people down when they call on you.

African feminism, womanism, and contextual equality

When asked to define her feminism, Dawuni is pragmatic but precise.

For me, feminism is simply the idea of equality of the sexes. But my reality as an African woman is different from my African-American sister who was born and raised as a Black woman in Louisiana. There may be commonalities, but there are also differences.

She often uses feminism and womanism interchangeably.

If the word feminism will not necessarily fly with some people, I have to be respectful of that. Womanism is rooted in African systems of womanhood and the communal nature of our lived experiences.

This fluidity is strategic: she builds bridges across communities, while refusing the universalizing assumptions of Western feminism.

Her work links African feminist thought to broader struggles of “third world feminists” — from Chicana to Asian to African thinkers — resisting racialized and colonial hierarchies in the feminist canon. Through her research, she has developed matri-legal feminism, a theoretical approach that centers the African matriarchal experience in the legal feminist discourse.

Research, resilience, and grassroots impact

Dawuni is candid about her doubts. “Sometimes I sit down and think, oh, my research and my activism are so elitist because I’m dealing with judges, lawyers, academics.” But she insists that elites, too, are subject to patriarchy — and shaping their consciousness can have ripple effects. “The multiplicative effect matters,” she explains.

If we are able to support women in law, and these women are gender-focused and minded, they will support other women. If judges are trained to recognize gendered dimensions of the law, if lawyers understand that what they thought was just ‘colleague play’ is actually harassment, then their clients and communities feel the impact.

Behind these professional achievements lies a story of perseverance through difficulty. Balancing motherhood, teaching, and research, Dawuni also endured profound personal losses during her doctoral studies. Rather than halting her trajectory, she channeled those experiences into her scholarship and activism. She recalls: “Through it all, I still finished my PhD. Everything I do, I remember my sister, I remember my mother. I’m doing it in their honor and just to keep pushing on in life.”

Photo by Dr. Jarpa Dawuni in her phd graduation outfit. Photo provided by Dr. Jarpa Dawuni, used with permission.

Photo by Dr. Jarpa Dawuni in her lawyer's gown and wig on call to the Ghana Bar as a lawyer in 2001. Photo provided by Dr. Jarpa Dawuni, used with permission.

Her resilience underscores a lesson she shares often with younger scholars: success is rarely linear.

People admire the blossoms but forget the roots. Success is like that. The roots are in the hard, painful, unseen work.

Advice for the next generation

For those just starting out, Dawuni emphasizes the importance of self-inspiration and preparation. She recounts how small encounters with women role models shaped her sense of what was possible.

In 1994, she read an Ebony magazine profile of Dr. Nanette Graham, a young professor and lawyer. Inspired, she cut out Graham’s picture and still keeps it almost thirty years later. A year later, she met Ghanaian lawyer Adeline Araba Ainooson. Dawuni admired her elegance and asked for a picture of her call to the bar. Araba sent one, writing on the back, “I hope it inspires you.” It did — and the two are still close friends today.

These early encounters became her compass.

Initially, I appeared to be lost — friends and family asked, ‘What do you really want to do — law, development work, or politics?’ But a common thread that ran through all my degrees was my passion for women’s and children’s rights. I decided to weave a mosaic from my interdisciplinary training in law, development, and politics. I chose academia — a profession that has allowed me to engage in research and to use my scholarship to promote activism for gender equity in law and access to justice.

As she explains, storytelling itself is a form of activism. “My goal is to move from the oral tradition of storytelling to the written tradition of documentation — to historicize women in law.”

Her advice to younger generations is straightforward:

You don’t have to wait for a mentor or for opportunity to come to you. Sometimes you just have to make your way. Hard work pays. Be a lifelong learner and strive for excellence. When you show up, let them know you are the right person.