Agwu was born in Enugu, Nigeria, the daughter of two teachers; Jacob Ukeje Agwu from Nigeria, and Europa Lauretta Durosimi Wilson, from Sierra Leone. In the Nigerian Civil War, her family supported the Biafran side, their home in Umuahia was damaged by Nigerian bombers. In 1968, Agwu, her mother, and her siblings left Nigeria on the final evacuation plane taking Biafrans to a refugee camp in Equatorial Guinea, and were moved from there to camps in Liberia and Sierra Leone. They left the refugee camps for her grandmother's house in Sierra Leone, but it had burned down, leaving them homeless. Most of her family returned to Nigeria after the end of the war in 1970, rejoining Agwu's father who had left the government service to become a farmer. Agwu stayed behind in Freetown, Sierra Leone as a student at the Fourah Bay CollegePrimary School and then at the Annie Walsh Memorial School. In 1980, Agwu returned to Nigeria. She studied mathematics at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, earning a bachelor's degree with honours in 1984. On the recommendation of two of her university teachers, James O. C. Ezeilo and Isabelle Adjaero, she went to the University of Connecticut for graduate study, the same university where Adjaero earned her PhD. Agwu started her studies there in 1987, after working as a government statistician and as a lecturer at Kaduna Polytechnic. Agwu completed a master's degree in mathematics at the University of Connecticut in 1989. She moved to the Syracuse University, where she completed her Ph.D. in mathematics education in 1995. Her dissertation, Using a Computer Laboratory Setting to Teach College Calculus, was supervised by Howard Cornelius Johnson. At Syracuse, her course of studies also included gender studies and multicultural education, and she was president of the African Students Union and of the Association of International Students.
Career and contributions
Agwu was appointed Coordinator of the Teaching and Learning Center at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. In 2009, Agwu served a term as New York City branch president of the American Association of University Women, with an agenda of encouraging girls and women in STEM fields and of improving health in minority communities. In 2014 she returned to Nigeria on a visit sponsored by a Carnegie Africa Diaspora Fellowship. Agwu's interest in ethnomathematics stemmed from her development of a discrete mathematics course that would cover the college's requirement that students take a writing-intensive course. Her work in this area includes using storytelling to allow mathematics students to relate better to the material, and examining the mathematical structure of Ndebele dolls, African textiles, and the game of Mancala.
