Minerals Income Investment Fund (MIIF) Chief Executive Officer Justina Nelson has used her address at the maiden Women in Finance Summit in Accra to offer a candid account of the institutional pressures she has navigated since taking office, framing her experience as evidence that principled leadership can convert adversity into organisational strength.
Speaking at the summit, held under the theme “Turning Obstacles into Gold: Unlocking Resilience and Leadership in Finance,” Mrs. Nelson said she assumed the MIIF chief executive role at a moment of simultaneous pressures: a legislative amendment that substantially reduced the fund’s statutory revenue base, a change in political leadership, and heightened public expectations linked to her appointment as the first woman to lead the sovereign fund.
She said these circumstances could easily have been perceived as setbacks, but that leaders who remain steady under pressure are better positioned to make sound decisions, inspire confidence, and guide their institutions through complexity. “These circumstances could easily have been perceived as setbacks,” she told delegates. “However, leaders who remain steady under pressure are better positioned to make sound decisions, inspire confidence, and guide their institutions through complexity.”
The legislative change she referenced was a significant one. The amended MIIF Act reduced the fund’s statutory share of mineral royalties from 77.6 percent to two percent, a structural shift that fundamentally altered the fund’s revenue trajectory and required management to recalibrate its institutional strategy.
Despite that constraint, MIIF reported assets under management reaching USD 919.39 million as of June 2025, a 58.46 percent increase from the year-end balance of USD 580.21 million recorded in 2024. Large-scale gold mining royalties for the first three quarters of 2025 reached USD 291.87 million, a 40.18 percent increase from the same period in 2024, while the manganese sector recorded a 170 percent surge in royalty inflows over the same period.
Mrs. Nelson connected the personal leadership message to the fund’s gender inclusion agenda, citing persistent data on women’s underrepresentation in the mining sector, where women account for only nine to ten percent of the large-scale mining workforce and 14 percent of senior positions, figures she described as far from where the sector needs to be.
She said the Women from Mining Communities (WoMCom) Scholarship Scheme, which has already supported more than 90 female Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) students from the University of Mines and Technology (UMaT) in Tarkwa, would be expanded to institutions in the middle belt and northern Ghana in 2026 in collaboration with corporate partners.
Mrs. Nelson closed with a direct appeal to women in the financial and natural resource sectors to hold firm under pressure. “Let us hold and defend one another for we are few at the top,” she said.
