There are politicians who win elections, and then there are politicians whose victories deserve to become political case studies.
Hon. Phillis Naa Koryoo Okunor, Member of Parliament for Awutu Senya East, arguably belongs in the second category.
The story of her emergence from Kasoa is bigger than simply adding another female MP to Ghana’s Parliament. Her 2024 performance provides an interesting case study in political resilience, constituency organisation, grassroots connection and the growing influence of a new generation of women in Ghanaian politics.
According to published constituency results, Naa Koryoo secured 50,886 votes, representing 52.72%, defeating the incumbent MP, Hon. Mavis Hawa Koomson, who obtained 45,638 votes. This was no ordinary political upset. Awutu Senya East had been represented by Hawa Koomson since 2013, and the constituency had developed a reputation as one of Ghana’s fiercely competitive political battlegrounds.
Even more remarkable is the wider context of Naa Koryoo’s numbers. Based on the compiled 2024 female-MP election data, she sits among the country’s highest-performing female parliamentary candidates and ranks third among the first-time female MPs in that compilation. The same dataset places her 50,886 votes above the parliamentary vote totals of other winning candidates in the Central Region.
That makes Kasoa worth studying.
She Didn’t Inherit a Comfortable Seat, She Took On a Political Fortress
Perhaps the most important part of the Naa Koryoo story is what she had to overcome.
She challenged an established incumbent who had successfully defended Awutu Senya East repeatedly and who had also served as a Cabinet Minister. Naa Koryoo had already contested the seat in 2020 and lost. Four years later, she returned and reversed the result.
That trajectory, lose, reorganise, return and win, deserves attention from young politicians.
Her political model suggests that losing an election does not necessarily end a political career. A first defeat can instead become the beginning of constituency building, provided the candidate remains visible, strengthens grassroots structures and converts political disappointment into organisation.
Why Upcoming Women in Politics Should Study the Kasoa Model
Ghana often discusses getting more women into politics. But representation cannot be reduced simply to encouraging women to put their names on ballot papers.
The more difficult question is: How do young women build political organisations capable of winning difficult constituencies?
That is where the Naa Koryoo experience becomes particularly interesting.
Her rise suggests a model built around visibility, accessibility, persistence, grassroots engagement and the ability to establish an identity beyond traditional political structures.
And importantly, she combines politics with an increasingly strong professional and academic profile.
Her official National Petroleum Authority profile records postgraduate legal education, professional qualifications and her pursuit of a PhD in Organizational Leadership. She has also undertaken professional legal training. That combination of politics, law, leadership studies, finance and public service presents a different image of what the next generation of female political leadership can look like.
Political Parties Should Pay Attention
There is also a broader lesson here for Ghana’s political parties.
When a relatively young woman demonstrates the ability to mobilise tens of thousands of voters in a highly competitive urban constituency, political institutions should be interested in understanding how that political machinery was built.
Not because every politician should imitate Naa Koryoo.
But because political parties interested in developing the next generation of women leaders should study successful examples: how candidates organise communities, communicate across demographic groups, survive political pressure, recover from electoral defeat and eventually convert grassroots relationships into votes.
Young female politicians with demonstrable electoral strength are valuable political assets, but they also operate in an environment that can be exceptionally unforgiving.
They should be subjected to scrutiny like every public official. At the same time, Ghana’s political culture should reject intimidation, personal attacks and gender-specific hostility as substitutes for legitimate political disagreement.
Protect the Space for Young Women to Compete
The bigger issue therefore goes beyond Naa Koryoo herself.
If Ghana genuinely wants more women in Parliament, the country must create a political environment in which ambitious young women can compete vigorously, disagree strongly, lose elections, return stronger and ultimately win, without being driven out of public life by intimidation or attacks unrelated to their performance.
Political parties similarly have an institutional interest in developing rather than prematurely exhausting emerging female political talent.
Naa Koryoo’s 2024 victory provides one example of why.
From losing Awutu Senya East in 2020 to defeating a formidable incumbent four years later with 50,886 votes, her journey offers something potentially more valuable than political hype:
A case study.
A case study in persistence.
A case study in grassroots politics.
A case study in building political identity.
And perhaps most importantly, a case study in how a new generation of Ghanaian women can move from being encouraged merely to participate in politics to developing the electoral strength required to win it.
The Naa Koryoo phenomenon deserves to be studied, because the future of women in Ghanaian politics will depend not only on opening the door for women, but on understanding how those who enter can build the strength to stay, compete and lead.
