Ashraf Ghani

Mohammad Ashraf Ghani is an Afghan scholar, politician and the current President of Afghanistan. He is an anthropologist by education and has taught the subject at the University of Columbia and Johns Hopkins University. Before running for the presidential seat, Ghani was an advisor to the UN secretary-general’s special envoy to Afghanistan and the provisional president Hamid Karzai. During his term, he was involved in the preparation of the Bonn Agreement and the introduction of a new Afghan currency. Ashraf Ghani was also part of the World Bank where he gained knowledge of the means of international development. He served as the Finance Minister of Afghanistan for two consecutive years and played an important part in the economic upturn of the country after the fall of the Taliban government. The 2009 presidential election saw him in the fourth position; consequently, in the 2014 election, he won 55.27% of the votes and was elected as the President of Afghanistan. Ghani is the co-founder of the Institute for State Effectiveness and a member of the Commission on Legal Empowerment of Poor. In 2013, the ‘Foreign Policy’ and ‘Prospect’ magazines ranked him second in their list of the world’s top 100 intellectuals.