Enid Forde
Enid Rosamund Ayodele Forde (23 January 1932 – 27 January 2010) was a Sierra Leonean geographer and the first Sierra Leonean woman to earn a PhD. She was born in Freetown and went to Buxton Primary School and Annie Walsh Memorial Secondary School. She studied at Fourah Bay College and the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, and earned her PhD from Northwestern University in 1966. Her dissertation was The Population of Ghana: A Study of the Spatial Relationships of Its Sociocultural and Economic Characteristics.
After returning to Sierra Leone at age 34, she taught at Annie Walsh Memorial Secondary School and later became head of the Geography Department at Fourah Bay College – University of Sierra Leone, and was warden of the Women’s Students program. In 1986 she helped carry out Sierra Leone's national population census and supported the country’s family planning efforts. She supported the Hillside Day Care Centre, founded in 1995 to help orphans of the civil war; it later became a preparatory school for more than 80 children.
Her brother, Winston Forde, dedicated his book The Story of Mining in Sierra Leone to her, praising her as a respected geographer and scholar.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 08:11 (CET).