Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai

Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai is a politician from Afghanistan. He is currently running in the presidential election of 2014. In the presidential election 2009, he came out the fourth, behind Hamid Karzai, Abdullah Abdulla and Ramazan Bashardost. He is popularly known by the name Ashraf Ghani, whilst Ahmadzai is the name of his tribve. Ghani formerly worked as a Finance Minister and also as a chancellor of the University of Kabul.

source of picture: www.timesofoman.com

Ghani is also the co-founder of the Institute for State Effectiveness; this is organizations that was set up in the year 2005, with the aim of improving the ability of the states and serve the citizens of the country. Before coming back to Afghanistan in the year 2002, Ghani was a leading student of political science and anthropology. He served at the worl bank, and he was working on the international development assistance. As the finance minister of the country between July 2002 and December 2004, Ghani led the attempt of his country to make a great economic recovery after the fall of the Taliban government.

Ghani is part of the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor, this is an independent initiative that was hosted by the UNDP. In the year 2010, Dropped him on the Top 100 Global thinkers’ list. In the year 2013, Prospect magazine made him the second in the world thinkers’ poll.

Early Years

Ghani was born in the year 1949 in the Logar region of Afghanistan. He is an ethnic Pashtun from an influential Ahmadzai tribe of the country. He finished his primary education as well as his secondary education in Habibia High School that is located in Kabul. He travelled to Lebanon to join the American University in Beirut, there he got his first degree in the year 1973. And it was there that he met his future wife, Rula. He came back to his country in the year 1977 to teach Afghan Studies and anthropology at the University of Kabul before gaining the government scholarship in the year 1977 to study for Master’s degree in anthropology in the Columbia University, U.S.

Academic Career

When the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) communist party assumed the mantle of leadership in the country in the year 1978, most of the male members of the tribe were taken to prison and Ghani was marooned in the United States. He stayed at the Columbia University and gained his PhD in Cultural anthropology. He was later invited to teach in the University of California, Berkeley in the year 1983, and then he was also invited to teach in the John Hopkins University from the year 1983 to the year 1991. At this period he became a constant commentator on the BBC Farsi/Persian and Pashto services, broadcast in his country. Also he has gone to the Harvard-INSEAD and Stanford business school leadership training program for the World Bank. Ghani worked on the faculty of Kabul University from the year 1973 to the year 1977, Aarhus University that is in Denmark in the year 1977, university of California, Berkeley in the year 1983 and Johns Hopkins University from the year 1983 to the year 1991. Ghani’s academic research was on the state construction and social reformation. In the year 1985, he finished a year of fieldwork researching Pakistani Madrass as a Fulbright student. Ghani also learned comparative religion.

World Bank

Ghani joined the World Bank in the year 1991, working on some project in the East and the Southern Asia through the middle section of the 1990s. In the year 1996, he engineered the application of the institutional and administrative scrutiny to macro process of alteration and reorganization, serving straight on the modification program of the Russian coal industry and ringing out some appraisals of the country succor strategies and structural modification programs of the bank globally. He spent the total of five years each in both China and India as he was running the large scale improvement and institutional reformation projects. Ghani served intensively with the media at the time of the first Gulf War, commenting on the radio and the television and also in the newspaper interviews.

Post-9/11

After 9/11, Ghani left the World Bank without collecting any payment from them and got himself engaged in an intensive interaction with the media, showing up often on PBS’s News Hour and also in BBC, CNN and the US National Public Radio as well as other broadcasters and also writing for some major newspapers. In November 2002, Ghani accepted an appointment as the Special Advisor the United Nation and so he helped Lakhdar Brahimi, the special representative of the secretary general to the Afghanistan, to concoct the Bonn Agreement, the procedure and manuscript that gave the foundation of transfer of political power to the people of Afghanistan.

Return to Afghanistan

After 24 years, Ghani returned to his country in the year 2001. He resigned from the post that he was handling at the United Nations and that of the World Bank to join the government of his country as the chief advisor to the then president of the country, Hamid Karzai on the 1^st February, 2002. He worked pro bono and Ghani was among the first executives to expose his assets. In this measurement, he worked on the groundwork of the Loya Jirgas that voted Karzai and approved the Afghanistan constitution. After the presidential election of the country in the year 2004, Ghani deteriorated to join the cabinet and requested to be selected as the chancellor of the University of Kabul. As the chancellor of the instoitution, he initiated participatory governance among the faculty, the staff of the school and among the students of the institution and he trained both men and women with the skills and the commitment to lead their nation.

After leaving the university, Ghani co-founded the Institute for State Effectiveness, and he was the chairman. The institute forwarded a framework that anticipated that the state should implement ten good functions so as to serve the citizens of the country. This framework was deliberated upon by the frontrunners and the managers of the post-conflict transitions at a meeting that was backed by the United Nations and the World Bank in September 2005. The program anticipated that double compact amid the international community, the government and the people of the country may he used as a basis for establishing assistance and some other intercessions, and that a yearly sovereignty index to measure state effectiveness should be piled up.

Mr. Ghani was angled to be the aspirant that will replace Kofi Annan as the Secretary General of the United Nations at the end of the year 2006, this was done in a front page report in the Financial Times on the 18^th September, 2006; that quoted him as saying, ‘I hope to win through ideas’.

In the year 2005, Ghani dropped a keynote for meetings, which included the American Bar Association’s International Rule of Law Symposium,Trans-Atlantic Policy Network, the UN-OECD-World Bank’s meeting on Fragile States and TEDGlobal, CSIS’ meeting on UN reform, the Trans-Atlantic Policy Network, the annual meeting of the Norwegian Government’s development staff. Ghani made a major contribution to the Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.

Finance Minister of Afghanistan

Ghani was given the award of the best finance minister of the Asian continent in the year 2003 b y Emerging Markets. He carried out some extensive reforms, which included the allotting of the new currency, automating of the treasury tasks, starting a single treasury account, implementing a policy of balanced budgets and making use of the budgets as the central policy device, unifying the revenue assortment tariff restructuring and refurbishing customs. He initiated steady reporting to the cabinet, the public and the international investors as a tool of pellucidity and accountability and needed benefactors to focus their interpolations on three sectors; refining culpability with government corresponding persons and formulating a development stratagem that held Afghans more responsible for their own forthcoming development.

On the March 31^st, 2004, Ghani presented a seven-year suite of public venture that is known as Securing Afghanistan’s Future to a global conference in Berlin that was attended by about 65 finance as well as foreign ministers. Termed the most ample program ever organized and presented by a country that is so poor to the international community. Securing Afghanistan’s Future was organized by a team of about 100 experts that were working under a committee that was overseen by Ghani. The impression of a double-compact, between the benefactors and the administration of Afghanistan on one hand and amid the government and people of Afghanistan on the other hand, reinforced the investment suite. The benefactors promised $8.2 billion at the conference for the first of the three years of the program and approved that the government’s appeal for a overall seven-year bundle of aid of $27.5 billion was defensible.

Poverty obliteration through wealth establishment and the formation of citizens' human rights is the core of Ghani’s development method. In Afghanistan, Ghani is credited with the designing of the National Solidarity Suite that offers block bequests to villages with importance and enactment defined by the designated village councils.

2009 Presidential Election

In January 2009, an article that was written by Majidyar Ahmad of the American Enterprise Institute added the name of Ghani on a list of the 15 candidates that could possibly contest in the presidential election of the country. On the 78^th May, 2009, Ghani registered as a candidate in the presidential election of the country. His campaign showed the relevance of a representative administration, good governance, a dynamic and straight economy and employment opportunities for the people of the country. Unlike other candidates, Ghani asked the privileged members of the country to support his campaign and aid him financially.

Preliminary results of the election placed him fourth in the field of 38, giving him about 3% of the total votes of the nation. 

Reconstruction

On the 28^th January, 2010, Ghani went to the International Conference on Afghanistan that took place in London, and pledged his support to assist in the rebuilding of their country. He sampled his idea to Karzai as a sample of the relevance of cooperation among the people of Afghanistan and with the international community, supporting the ceasefire strategy of Karzai.

2014 Presidential Election

Ghani is one of the major candidates that are contesting for the post of president in Afghanistan in the 2014 presidential election.