I know that many would argue that the pool of well-known African women is limited to Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Nobel Peace Laureate Wangari Maathai, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the former Nigerian minister of finance and current World Bank vice president, Graça Machel, the former First Lady of Mozambique and South Africa, and a few others. They might be right, but any of those four women would be more effective at mediating conflicts in Africa than all the presidents of AU countries combined.