Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman
Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman is a doctoral candidate at Harvard Kennedy School studying public policy and economics. She is a doctoral fellow for the National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation, Center for Black Entrepreneurship, Roosevelt Institute, Russell Sage Foundation, and Stone Program in Wealth Distribution, Inequality & Social Policy, and a graduate affiliate at Harvard Kennedy School’s Women and Public Policy Center and the Institute for Quantitative Science.
Her first book, The Black Agenda: Bold Solutions for a Broken System (2022), is the first trade publication to exclusively feature Black scholars and experts across economics, education, health, climate, criminal justice, and technology. She also co-founded #BlackBirdersWeek in 2019 and The Sadie Collective in 2018—the first nonprofit addressing the underrepresentation of Black women in economics and related fields.
The youngest recipient of the CEDAW Women’s Rights Award from the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women—an honor previously given to Vice President Kamala Harris—her writing and commentary appear in TIME, Bloomberg, NPR, and The New York Times.
In 2023, she was selected to be part of the inaugural Forbes 30 Under 30 Boston cohort. In 2025, Common Future selected her as one of their “Futurists of the Year” for her focus on economic inequality. Her second book, The Double Tax, published by Penguin/Portfolio and Little, Brown Books UK, explores the costs women face, why the bill runs higher for women of color, and why closing the gaps helps everyone.
