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| Dr. Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai |
Ashraf Ghani was born on 19 May 1949 in the Logar Province of Afghanistan, he belongs to the Ahmadzai Pashtun tribe. He attended the American University in Beirut, where he earned his bachelor's degree in 1973 and his Master's degree in 1977. At the American University in Beirut he met his future wife and current First Lady of Afghanistan, Rula Saade
(Rula was born and raised in Lebanon to a Lebanese Christian family), while studying at the American University of Beirut. Dr. Ashraf Ghani is an economist and anthropologist. He is President of Afghanistan since 21 September 2014. Dr. Ashraf Ghani has previously served as the Minister of Finance and as the chancellor of Kabul University. Before returning to Afghanistan in 2002, Dr. Ashraf Ghani, worked with the World Bank. As the Finance Minister of Afghanistan between July 2002 and December 2004, he led Afghanistan’s attempted economic recovery after the collapse of the Taliban government. He is the co-founder of the Institute for State Effectiveness, an organization set up in 2005 to improve the ability of states to serve their citizens. In 2005 he gave a TED talk, in which he discussed how to rebuild a broken state such as Afghanistan. President Ghani is a member of the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor, an independent initiative hosted by the United Nations Development Program. In 2013 he was ranked second in an online poll to name the world’s top 100 intellectuals conducted by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines. He was named in the same poll in 2010.
