Chief Bisi was not allowed to leave Nigeria to receive the honor in person. Her brother, Rev. Shole Olukolade, accepted the award on her behalf.
The other recipient of this year's Africa Leadership Prize is Brigadier General Amadou Toumani Touré of Mali, who was lauded for leading his country to multiparty democracy.
Chief Bisi was cited as "a pioneer in the economic empowerment of women and a strong and longtime leader in the fight to free her country of Nigeria from hunger, poverty, environmental degradation and injustice."
Educated in England and the U.S., she began helping women organize by donating one month's salary to a group of rural women so they could start their own business. In 1982, she founded the Country Women Association of Nigeria, with six cooperatives of 150 members. Today the association comprises nearly 1400 groups with 31,000 active members.
An articulate spokeswoman in the international community, Bisi has been an active proponent of women's concerns at all major U.N. conferences since the 1992 Earth Summit.
She and General Touré join 16 previous Africa Prize laureates, including Women's Environment & Development Organization's board of directors member Wangari Maathai of Kenya; Esther Ocloo, founder of Women's World Banking; President Nelson Mandela of South Africa; and the presidents of Ghana, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Senegal.
(The preceding story is an edited version of an article originally appearing in the Nov./Dec. 1996 edition of News & Views, a publication of the Women's Environment and Development Organization.)