Ashraf Ghani

President of Afghanistan

19 May 1949 Logar, Afghanistan

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29 September 2014 – 15 August 2021

Former president of Afghanistan (2014-2021) This article is about a person involved in a current event. Information may change rapidly as the event progresses, and initial news reports may be unreliable. The last updates to this article may not reflect the most current information. Please feel free to improve this article (but note that updates without valid and reliable references will be removed) or discuss changes on the talk page. (August 2021 ) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) Mohammad Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai (Pashto/Dari: محمد اشرف غني احمدزی ; born 19 May 1949) is an Afghan politician, academic, and economist who served as president of Afghanistan between September 2014 and August 2021. On 15 August 2021, the Taliban took control of Afghanistan and he fled the country. Ghani was first elected on 20 September 2014 and was re-elected in the 28 September 2019 presidential election. He was announced the winner after a protracted process in February 2020 and was sworn in for a second term on 9 March 2020. An anthropologist by education, he previously served as Minister of Finance and the Chancellor of Kabul University. Before returning to Afghanistan in 2002, Ghani was a professor of anthropology at numerous institutions (mostly Johns Hopkins University), and later started working 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. He is a member of the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor, an independent initiative hosted by the United Nations Development Programme. In 2013 he was ranked 50th in an online poll to name the world's top 100 intellectuals conducted by Foreign Policy magazine and second in a similar poll run by Prospect magazine. An independent politician, Ghani came in fourth in the 2009 presidential election, behind Hamid Karzai, Abdullah Abdullah, and Ramazan Bashardost. In the first round of the 2014 presidential election, Ghani secured 35% of the vote, second to Abdullah who secured 45% of the votes cast. However, in the second round Ghani secured around 55.3% of the votes while Abdullah secured around 44.7% of the votes cast. As a result, chaos ensued and the United States intervened to form a unity government. Ghani was re-elected when the final results of the 2019 presidential elections were announced after a long delay on 18 February 2020. He was sworn in as president for a second five-year term on 9 March 2020.