Architect Lesley Lokko becomes first female African winner of prestigious RIBA Royal Gold Medal

Hailed as “a visionary agent of change”, Lesley Lokko becomes the first woman of African descent to win the top award of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has named Ghanaian-Scottish architect, educator and author Lesley Lokko as the 2024 recipient of the prestigious RIBA Royal Gold Medal.

The 60-year-old architect receives the award for her work surrounding justice causes and other attempts to “democratize architecture”.

Lokko has long championed bringing people of colour and other under-represented backgrounds into architecture over the past two decades, and in 2021, she founded the educational African Futures Institute (AFI) in Accra, Ghana, to further explore complex relationship between architecture, identity and race.

She becomes the first woman of African descent to win the Gold Medal since its founding in 1848.