President Pedro Verona Pires of Cape Verde has won the 2011 Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership, committee chairman Salim Ahmed Salim said on Monday.
In 2009 and 2010, the Mo Ibrahim Foundation did not choose anyone because it felt no one made the grade.
Salim said via a video to Johannesburg that the committee had been impressed at how the country had graduated from the United Nations' least developed category.
Pires had transformed his country from an autocratic to a democratic society, able to lose an election and accept the loss.
The country had also become a middle-income country despite few natural resources.
