Africa Alumni Webinar Series - Agricultural Justice in Action: The Harvard–Ghana Project Transforming Law, Policy, and Farming Communities

This exciting conversation will explore the impact of clinical legal education and economic advocacy developed through a 20-year partnership between Harvard University and the University of Ghana to strengthen legal education and help realize social justice. It will highlight potential benefits and drawbacks of working through an academic clinic to address deep structural challenges and to inform policy changes at a national level. 

The webinar features Professor Lucie White, Harvard Law School, Professor Raymond Atuguba of University of Ghana and Nikki Okrah, CEO of Chaku Foods. Both Atuguba and Okrah having graduated from Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School respectively returned to Ghana to effect change in their communities leveraging their Harvard networks and partnerships.

Background: A 20+ year partnership between the Harvard Law School and the University of Ghana led to the successful establishment of the Agricultural Justice Clinic at the University of Ghana. The clinic addresses issues of social justice by using the law to address the everyday realities of farmers and agricultural systems. This project was supported by the Motsepe Presidential Research Accelerator Fund for Africa - a collaboration of the Office of the Vice Provost and the Harvard Center for African Studies.

Thursday, April 23, 2026 
12:00pm to 1:15pm ET (USA Eastern)  
6pm CAT (Central Africa Time) 
4pm WAT (West Africa Time) 

Biographies
Raymond Akongburo

Professor Raymond Akongburo ATUGUBA is currently the Director of Legal Education and of the Ghana School of Law. He is Professor of General Jurisprudence and immediate past Dean of the University of Ghana School of Law (2019-2025), where he has taught since 2002. He was also the Consulting Foundation Dean of the Faculty of Law, University for Development Studies, Tamale, Ghana (2024-2025). He has been a Visiting Professor of Law and the Henry J. Steiner Visiting Professor of Human Rights at Harvard Law School (2018–2019) and a Bok Visiting International Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School (Spring 2024). He has taught over 40 related courses at different universities in Africa, Europe, the United States of America, Canada, and Australia. His research interests are in Policy, Law and Development in the Global South; Constitutional and Administrative Law in Africa; and Transnational Perspectives on Human Rights, Law and Organising and Community Lawyering. Professor Atuguba is a graduate of the University of Ghana and of Harvard Law School, where he obtained a Master of Laws degree (LL.M.) and did doctoral studies (S.J.D). Professor Atuguba has also worked in the public sector (he was one time the Executive Secretary to the Constitution Review Commission of Ghana and later Executive Secretary to the President of Ghana); the private sector (he is founder and former Team Leader of Law and Development Associates (LADA) and Managing Partner of Atuguba and Associates); and the non-profit sector (he is co-founder, former Executive Director and former Board Chair of the Legal Resources Centre and Board Chair of LADA Institute). Professor Atuguba has over 100 publications, been engaged in over 100 research and advocacy projects and produced over 100 research and technical reports. In over 25 years, he has delivered more than 500 papers and presentations on all continents of the world, and been involved in the audit, review, and drafting of over 500 constitutions, policies, main legislation, strategies, regulations, guidelines, manuals, and procedures, mainly in African countries and around the world. He has consulted for many African governments (The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea Bissau,Lesotho, Liberia, Nigeria, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Zimbabwe, etc.); major local and international development organisations and agencies (The UN, UNDP, UN-OHCR, UNICEF, UNHCR, UNODC, UNMIL, FAO, The World Bank, ILO, IOM, EU, AU, ECOWAS, USAID, DFID (UK-AID), GIZ (GTZ), DANIDA, FES, KAF, 

ICHRP, OXFAM, IBIS, IIED); and Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) (ActionAid International, Human Rights Watch, Human Rights First, CARE International, Plan International, Ford Foundation, OSI, OSIWA, etc). He has also designed, led or co-led over 100 training programmes and workshops and chaired or sat on over 100 boards and committees, national and international.

Sangu Delle 

Sangu is Chairman and CEO of CarePoint, a tech forward healthcare group focused on "building Africa's healthcare future." He is also Founder & Executive Chairman of Golden Palm Investments Corporation, one of Africa’s leading venture capital firms. Delle has been named a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, a 2022 Eisenhower Fellow, Africa’s “Young Person of the Year”, a 2014 TEDGlobal Fellow, a 2013 Soros Fellow, one of Forbes’ top 30 most promising entrepreneurs in Africa, and one of Euromoney’s “Africa’s Rising Stars”. Sangu is a member of Harvard University's governing Board of Overseers Center and a board member of Ashesi University and Ghana International School. Sangu graduated with a BA, a JD, and an MBA from Harvard University, a Masters from Oxford University and a PhD from the University of Birmingham (UK). Sangu is the author of "Making Futures: Young Entrepreneurs in a Dynamic Africa" which was published in September 2019. He is a mental health activist with a TED Talk on the stigma of mental health which has garnered over 2 million views.

Nikki Okrah 

Nikki is a Ghanaian-American entrepreneur innovating at the intersection of food, agriculture & technology. Based in Ghana, she is the Founder and CEO of Chaku Food and President at Chaku Research Institute. Chaku has built a patent pending AI/ML based crop yield prediction and traceability system called ChakuTech, that maps African farmers' land and predicts crop-yields in order to efficiently collect and aggregate crops post harvest. This alleviates poverty and mitigates against climate change while building resilient global food supply chains. Prior to founding Chaku, she worked on solving global payment challenges at Visa Inc. in product, merchant business development and strategy roles working across US, Africa, Middle East and Central Europe. Her experiences gave her inspiration and critical skills needed to leverage technology to solve pressing problems facing small shareholder farmers back home in Ghana. Her work was initially doubling the incomes of farmers who live 2 hours away from her childhood home in Kumasi, Ghana, through sourcing of plantain which was used as an input for an exported snack product. Through the development of ChakuTech, she intends to scale the economic impact across millions of smallholder farmers in Africa and throughout the global south.  

She received her B.A. in Political Science with minors in Business and African Studies at Northwestern University, where she served as the 2024 Commencement speaker for her undergrad college (WCAS). She has an MBA from Harvard, where Chaku Foods won the Harvard President’s Innovation Challenge (PIC) in 2021 and was a Social Impact Fellowship Fund recipient (2021) . She is a 2023 Mulago Rainer Fellow. She enjoys reading, running, weight-lifting and hiking. She grew up in Worcester, MA, USA after her family emigrated from Ghana when she was 5 years old.  

Lucie White

Lucie White is the Louis A. Horvitz Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. After working for two decades on US social welfare law, she turned to the issue of extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. Thus, in 1999 she launched the Harvard Law School’s Ghana project, which is on-going. The project brings together Ghanaian partners and student teams to work on the realization of economic and social rights for Ghana’s least advantaged groups. After working on health finance and mental health, the group turned to the oil industry’s economic and human impacts and geographical inequities in primary education grounded in histories of northern Ghanians’ enslavement and colonial exploitation. In 2010 she built on this work to found the “Stones of Hope” project. This is a collaboration among African human rights activists and global rights scholars to examine African innovations in Economic and Social Rights advocacy. The project culminated in L. White and J. Perelman eds., Stones of Hope: African Lawyers Use Human Rights to Challenge Global Poverty (Stanford University Press, 2010). Subsequently she worked extensively with HLS and Ghanaian students on the human rights dimensions of West Africa’s petroleum policies as. With an Open Society grant she worked with South African activists to envision a “new South African constitutionalism” and has participated in a number of Harvard Institute of Global Law and Policy initiatives, including a long term research project on human rights and heterodox development. She is currently working on a series of personal essays about growing up as a white girl in the Jim Crow South, as well as a collaborative initiative which, in the face of the current global climate crisis, considers “sustainable regions” as pathways toward post-developmentalist futures. She teaches in the areas of Global Poverty; Social Welfare/Economic and Social Rights with a focus on sub-Saharan Arfrica; Law and Inequality; Economic Development and its Alternatives, Reparation for Africans’ Enslavement.  She has been admitted to the Bar in DC, North Carolina, and California, and has worked as a Legal Aid lawyer in North Carolina andd an advocate for unhoused persons in Los Angeles.  She clerked for District Judge James McMillan of the Western District of North Carolina, who presided over several significant race discrimination, welfare justice, and prison reform cases before and during her clerkship.  She has received numerous fellowships, grants, and awards and written widely about everyday life, law, and social movement among marginalized groups, particularly those with histories of race subordination, enslavement, and colonization.