She served as the Cabinet Secretary for Foreign Affairs of Kenya from May 2013 to February 2018, when President Uhuru Kenyatta, after re-election, moved her to the Education docket.
[7] Mohamed spent her childhood in a modest household in Amalemba, Kakamega, where she passed much of her time reading Sherlock Holmes stories and other detective fiction.
[5] For her elementary studies, Mohamed attended the Township Primary School in Kakamega and later Butere Girls and Highlands Academy.
[5] Mohamed is multilingual, speaking her native Somali as well as English, Russian and Swahili, with a working knowledge of French.
[5] Between 1986 and 1990, Mohamed served as a Legal Advisor in Kenya's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where she drafted and negotiated various bilateral and international treaties.
In 2002, Mohamed acted as president of the Conference on Disarmament and was appointed the first female chairperson of the International Organization for Migration.
[10] In July 2011,[11] Mohamed was named Assistant Secretary-General and Deputy Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
[2] According to the Business Daily Africa publication, "Kenya’s vigorous lobbying and aggressive pan-Africanism agenda gained momentum with the collapse of International and Criminal Court (ICC) cases against Mr Kenyatta and Mr Ruto partly because attributed to Ms Mohamed’s skillful diplomatic maneuvers.
"[14] The same publication reported that Mohamed by late 2016 had "come under heavy criticism for remaining tight-lipped over the suffering of Kenyan detainees in Ethiopia.” Also, in December 2016 she stated that Kenya supported “Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic's quest for self-rule and its membership of the African Union,” which proved controversial with Morocco and other Arab states.
[11] In 2017, Mohamed was nominated by President Uhuru Kenyatta to serve as chair of the African Union Commission (AUC).
[15] Despite lobbying for the role from the Kenyan government, Mohamed lost the position to Moussa Faki, the foreign affairs minister of Chad.
[16] In late April 2017, she had a series of meetings with US officials such as Senator Bob Corker, Tom Shannon, and Constance Hamilton, where she urged the US to continue to interact with Kenya for the benefit of both nations.
[11] On 20 May 2017, it was reported that Mohamed had met with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov in Beijing, afterwards stating that she felt the meetings signaled possible renewed engagements between Kenya and Russia.
In March 2019, President Kenyatta appointed Amina Mohamed to be the Cabinet Secretary for Sports, Heritage and Culture,[22] replacing the fired Rashid Echesa.
[27] By October 2020, the WTO's General Council selected two finalists – Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and Yoo Myung-hee – thereby eliminating Mohamed and two other candidates.