Edna Adan Ismail

Edna Adan Ismail was born in 1937 in Hargeisa, in what was then British Somaliland, the daughter of a doctor who let her follow him on his rounds. When she was eight she was circumcised, at her grandmother's arrangement, while her father was away; his anger when he returned stayed with her, and she has campaigned against the practice for most of her life.

She was sent to Britain in the 1950s to train as a nurse, midwife and hospital manager, becoming the first Somali woman qualified in those fields, and came home in 1961 to a newly independent country where a woman with her skills was regarded with suspicion. She married the politician Mohamed Haji Ibrahim Egal, and for a time was first lady of Somalia; the marriage ended, and she went on to a long career with the World Health Organization across Africa and the Middle East.

She retired in 1997 with a plan she had been saving for since her twenties. Somaliland, which had declared independence after the collapse of Somalia, had one of the highest rates of maternal death in the world. The government gave her a piece of land that had been used as a rubbish dump and an execution ground. She sold her car, put in her pension and her savings, and the Edna Adan Maternity Hospital opened in 2002. It trains nurses and midwives for the whole country.

She was Somaliland's foreign minister from 2003 to 2006 and received the Templeton Prize in 2023. She still lives at the hospital.