Yvonne Libona Bonzi-Coulibaly is the first female doctorate in chemistry in Burkina Faso, a full professor at the University of Ouagadougou, a member of the Academy of Sciences of Burkina Faso, the Director-General of the Institute of Sciences of Burkina Faso, and a laureate of the African Union Kwame Nkrumah Prize.
After obtaining a "baccalauréat série D" in 1978, she entered the Université Félix Houphouët-Boigny in Abidjan to study chemistry-biology-geology. Bonzi-Coulibaly earned a doctorate at Strasbourg-I University in organic chemistry from Guy Ourisson.
From 2008 to 2013, she was director of research at the University of Ouagadougou, where she has been a professor-researcher since 2002. She is a member of the Academy of Sciences of Burkina Faso. Since 2018, she has been the Director-General of Burkina Faso's Institute of Sciences which was created in 2004.
In 2020, in partnership with the academic and scientific cooperation of higher education establishments of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation, she began working with Pascal Gerbaux on organic farming and market gardening to replace synthetic inputs with bio-inputs.
2013: African Union Kwame Nkrumah Prize