Professor Lydia Aziato is a nurse and academic from Ghana who worked her way up through the ranks to become the vice chancellor of the Volta Region-based University of Health and Allied Sciences in Ghana. She is now the fifth woman in Ghanaian history to hold the office of Vice Chancellor at a public university.
Abrodiem, a one-person rural settlement in Ghana’s Eastern region, is where Aziato is from. She would go more than a mile to the neighboring village in order to receive an education. She studied science in high school but was unable to achieve the necessary grade to be admitted to the university.
In Ghana’s capital Accra, she subsequently made the decision to study nursing at Korle Bu Nursing Training College, where she ultimately earned five honors out of seven subjects. She was forced to forego a required three-year job requirement before continuing her education because of her high academic performance.
After being accepted to the University of Ghana and graduating with the highest GPA (grade point average, or the average of all grades calculated on a seven-point grading scale) in her class, she was able to accomplish her desire of pursuing a university degree.
She excelled academically, and the university urged her to stay and support the institution. They then asked the ministry of health for approval to send her to the institution.
“After this, I started [working on] my master’s degree in 2003, which I completed in 2005. I won a scholarship to the University of South Wales. By this time, I had my first child and was pregnant with my second and, so, I had to defer my admission and finally left my children in the care of my mum,” she told University World News.
Determined to have her Ph.D., she took a loan and enrolled with the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, in 2011. Prior to that, she had lost both her parents and siblings.
“By March 2013, I had graduated. After this, I didn’t put out the fire. I realized that university was not just about teaching alone. So, I set out to publish papers and did that with zeal. I finally got my full professorship and was made the first substantive dean of the school of nursing at the University of Ghana. I applied for this position and was appointed, and I took over on 1 August 2022,” she noted.
According to Aziato, starting as a nurse and rising to become a Vice Chancellor did not come easy. She observed that the nursing and midwifery profession has a lot of glass ceilings.
“If you go to the ministry of health, for instance, you don’t find many nurses in the position of director. If you go to the universities, no nurse has ever been a pro-vice-chancellor. We never had a nurse as a professor,” the academic and mother of three noted.
Aziato overcame several barriers to success because she was not scared to take chances. She made history at the University of Ghana as the first substantive dean, and she made history once more when she was recognized by Sigma Theta Tau International, the second-largest nursing organization in the world with headquarters in Indianapolis, United States, as the Emerging Nurse Researcher in the Africa sub-region.