Dr. Leo Igwe
Leo Igwe, PhD, is Director of the Critical Thinking Social Empowerment Foundation (CriThink Africa), Founder and CEO of the Advocacy for Alleged Witches, and a Board Member of Humanists International, with three decades of experience in humanist activism and human rights advocacy.
He is a Nigerian human rights advocate and scholar of religion known internationally for documenting and combating witch persecution, ritual attacks, and other abuses linked to superstition in Africa.
As Director of the Critical Thinking Social Empowerment Foundation, Leo leads a campaign to introduce critical thinking as a subject in African primary schools. He writes and publishes critical thinking books and learning aids, conducts training workshops for teachers and pupils, lobbies school boards and policymakers, and cooperates with UNESCO and other international bodies on the project.
The organization began in 2019 as the Center for Critical Thinking, inspired by the reception of his article iDoubt: Critical Thinking and Skepticism in Africa in an Internet Age in Skeptical Inquirer, and was incorporated in 2022.
In 2021, Leo organized the first critical thinking workshops and teacher trainings for primary schools in Oyo State, Nigeria. Read Critical thinking, tool for future jobs and challenges and Nigerian Educator Dr Leo Igwe: Critical Thinking and Why it Matters in Africa.
Leo launched the Advocacy for Alleged Witches (AfAW) in January 2020 with the support of Humanists International, declaring 2020 to 2030 a Decade of Activism Against Witch Persecution in Africa with the vision of making witchhunts history by 2030. Deploying compassion, reason, and science, AfAW defends the rights and dignity of people accused of witchcraft and has intervened in cases across Nigeria, Ghana, Malawi, and Kenya, helping victims relocate, obtain medical treatment, report to the police, and prosecute witch hunters.
AfAW marks the World Day Against Witch Hunts every August 10, and Leo also serves on the team of the International Network Against Witchcraft Accusations and Ritual Attacks. Read “Alleged witches are still killed today, in 2020”, says humanist anti-witchcraft activist Leo Igwe, The Advocacy for Alleged Witches to Mark World Day Against Witch Hunts, and Making Witch Hunting History: Dr. Leo Igwe’s Fight for Justice. Listen to AFI Podcast: Dr. Leo Igwe on Ending Witchcraft Accusations in Africa.
Leo was elected to the Board of Humanists International in 2020 and reelected in 2024 for a term running to 2027. He is also a Board Member of the Humanist Association of Nigeria and led the international campaign to free its President, Mubarak Bala, who was arrested in 2020 on blasphemy charges over a Facebook post, sentenced to 24 years in prison in 2022, and released in early 2025 after the sentence was reduced to five years on appeal. Read Dr. Leo Igwe’s Journey to Free Mubarak Bala and Nigerian atheist jailed for blasphemy over Facebook posts.
Leo founded the Nigerian Humanist Movement, now the Humanist Association of Nigeria, in 1996 in Ibadan. He served as the Western and Southern African representative of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (now Humanists International), worked for the IHEU in the UK and the Center for Inquiry in the US, and was the founding Director of the Center for Inquiry–Nigeria.
Between 2018 and 2022, he was a Guest Lecturer at the Catholic University for Applied Sciences in Munich, Germany, teaching courses on Religion and Migration and on NGOs and Social Change in Africa, with areas of expertise spanning witchcraft and African religions, philosophy of religion, nonreligion and humanism, and transhumanism and posthumanism.
In 2012, Leo was appointed a Research Fellow of the James Randi Educational Foundation, working to counter the deadly effects of superstition and advance scientific skepticism in Africa and around the world, and he authored A Manifesto for a Skeptical Africa, which received endorsements from activists and skeptics worldwide.
He appeared in the 2008 BBC documentary Saving Africa’s Witch Children, which premiered on HBO in 2010 and chronicled crimes committed against children accused of witchcraft. His fieldwork rescuing accused children has brought him physical attacks and multiple arrests, including detention by police in Akwa Ibom State in 2011 while attempting to rescue two children who were victims of witchcraft accusations. Watch Leo Igwe: Witch Hunts, Misogyny and Enlightenment in Black Communities.
Leo coedits the Transhumanism and Africa book series with Ojochogwu Abdul under the Trivent Transhumanism imprint of Trivent Publishing. He is a Keynote Speaker and Scientific Committee Member of the Africa International Conference on Human Enhancement (AICHE 2026), the first major conference on human enhancement in Africa, organized by Transhumanists Africa and the Enlightenment Transhumanist Forum of Nigeria at the University of Abuja in December 2026. Watch Interview with Leo Igwe – 11th Beyond Humanism Conférence.
Leo earned his PhD in Religious Studies in 2017 from the University of Bayreuth in Germany through the Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies, with his dissertation titled The Witch is not a Witch: The Dynamics and Contestations of Witchcraft Accusations in Northern Ghana.
He earned his M.A. in Philosophy from the University of Calabar in Nigeria and his B.Phil. in Philosophy from the Seat of Wisdom Seminary in Owerri. Raised in a strictly Catholic household in southeastern Nigeria, Leo entered the seminary at age twelve to train for the priesthood, resigned at 24, and relocated to Ibadan, where he began building the Nigerian humanist movement.
In 2014, Leo was chosen as a laureate of the International Academy of Humanism. He is a two-time recipient of the Distinguished Services to Humanism Award (2014 and 2017) from the International Humanist and Ethical Union and received the 2021 Heart of Humanism Award from the Foundation Beyond Belief for his advocacy on behalf of Mubarak Bala and his work on witchcraft-related persecution. His TEDGlobal 2017 talk, Why I choose humanism over faith, has been viewed more than 1.3 million times on TED.com.
Watch Human rights activist Leo Igwe on religious violence in Nigeria and Leo Igwe: Nigerian Freethought Activist. Listen to A Conversation with Leo Igwe. Read his Contributions in Skeptical Inquirer, Contributions in Free Inquiry, Contributions in TheHumanist.com, and Contributions on OpenGlobalRights.
Visit his LinkedIn profile, Wikipedia page, TED speaker page, and Academia profile. Follow him on X.