Atlantic Council

Biography

Ashraf Ghani

Ashraf Ghani is Chairman of the State Effectiveness Institute, which exists to rethink the role of the state in the globalized world from the citizen perspective, and a member of the Council's Strategic Advisors Group. Dr Ghani is also currently involved in a number of activities supporting the reform of global institutions, including work as a Commissioner on the UN High-Level Panel on Legal Empowerment of the Poor, as a Governor of IDEA and the World Justice Project of the American Bar Association. Recently, the Government of Afghanistan nominated him for the position of United Nations Secretary General. He is currently on leave from his position as Chancellor of Kabul University.

As Adviser to the UN during the formulation, negotiation and implementation of the Bonn Agreement for Afghanistan, Chief Adviser to President Karzai during the Interim Administration and Afghanistan's Finance Minister for the duration of the Transitional Administration, he is widely credited with the design and implementation of some of Afghanistan's significant reforms during this period. Previously, he was Lead Anthropologist at the World Bank, spending nearly a decade reviewing country strategies, conditionalities, and designing reform programs, including in Russia, India, China and Vietnam.

Born in Afghanistan in 1949, he studied political science at the American University of Beirut, earning degrees there in 1973 and 1977. He continued his academic career in the United States, where he studied international affairs and anthropology at Columbia University where he earned his PhD. He later attended the Harvard-INSEAD and Stanford business schools leadership training program for the World Bank. He served on the faculty of Kabul University (1973-77), Aarhus University in Denmark (1977), University of California, Berkeley (1983), and Johns Hopkins University (1983-1991). He is married with two children and lives in Washington DC and Kabul.