Awardees will be selected through a comprehensive process comprising the following stages:
1) Nominations will be invited from the public across all African countries.
2) Nominations will be verified and authenticated and assessed by our consultants, and a shortlist of nominees will be drawn up
3) Our specially constituted Awards Selection Jury will then assess and deliberate on all the shortlisted nominations. Actual winners will be determined by voting by the Jury’s members, with contenders that get the least votes falling out of contention in each voting round until one nominee gets a simple majority of the nine votes cast.
4) Winners would then be informed of their selection and would make arrangements for their formal conferment of the award.
The event will also publicly recognize Africans in the diaspora, including, but not limited to those who came to Ghana for the unique “Year of Return” programme during 2019 and who either have committed to make major investments in Africa or who have expressed genuine in doing so as well as those whose visits to Ghana last year have generated positive publicity for the continent internationally because of their global reputations. We will confer special African Diasporan Excellence Awards on a selection of such people. The selection of awardees will be done directly by a specially constituted awards jury comprising representation from the organizers, the implementers of the Year of Return initiative and representation from widely reputed and recognized pan African business groupings, such as the Business Council for Africa, as well as recognized people in the United States with regards to trade and investment relations with Africa, who will be nominated by the Mayor of New York. Furthermore a small select group of public officials from Africa will be given special awards for their efforts towards facilitating trade and investment between African countries and the rest of the world.