Ashraf Ghani was born in 1949 in the Logar province of Afghanistan. He has studied political science and international affairs at the American University of Beirut. He later attended Columbia University. At Columbia, he earned his Master's and PhD in Anthropolgy.

He has also 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).

His academic research was on state-building and social transformations. An ethnic Pashtun and a Muslim, in 1985 he undertook a year of fieldwork researching Pakistani Madrasas as a Fulbright Scholar. He has also studied comparative religion. He joined the World Bank in 1991, working on projects in East Asia and South Asia until the mid 1990s.

In 1996, he pioneered the application of institutional and organizational analysis to macro processes of change and reform, working directly on the adjustment program of the Russian coal industry and carrying out reviews of the Bank’s country assistance strategies and structural adjustment programs globally.

He spent five years in each China, India, and Russia managing large-scale development and institutional transformation projects. He had worked intensively with the media during the first Gulf War, commenting on major radio and television programs and being interviewed by newspapers.

Dr. Ashraf Ghani is the Chairman of the Institute of State Effectiveness, an organization set up in January 2005 to promote the ability of states to serve their citizens. As Afghanistan's finance minister between July 2002 and December 2004, he set the path for Afghanistan's attempted economic recovery after the collapse of the Taliban. Dr. Ghani is also a member of the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor, an independent initiative hosted by the UNDP.

Returning after 24 years to Afghanistan in December 2001, he resigned from his posts at the UN and World Bank to join the Afghan government as the chief advisor to President Hamid Karzai on February 1, 2002. Mr. Ghani was tipped as a candidate to succeed Kofi Annan as Secretary General of the United Nations at the end of 2006.

Ashraf Ghani was recognized as the best finance minister of Asia in 2003 by Emerging Markets. During his tenure as finance minister of Afghanistan, he carried out a series of extensive reforms. He issued a new currency in record time, computerized the operations of the treasury, instituted the single treasury account, adopted a policy of no-deficit financing, introduced the budget as the central instrument of policy, centralized revenue, reformed the tariff system, and overhauled customs.

He instituted regular reporting to the cabinet, the people of Afghanistan, and international stakeholders as a tool of transparency and accountability, and broke new ground in the coordination of donor assistance by requiring donors to keep their interventions to three sectors, thereby bringing clarity and mutual accountability to their relations with government counterparts, and preparing a development strategy that held Afghans more accountable for their own future development.

Ashraf Ghani is now an active contender in the Afghan presidential election, 2009. According to an Italian News Agency, Ashraf Ghani is a US citizen. According to Chapter Three, Article Sixty Two of Afghanistan Constitution an Afghanistan citizen shall be the president of Afghanistan. Since Afghanistan has not signed dual citizenship accord with any other country he should apply for Afghanistan citizenship first.

Source: Wikipedia.Org

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The End. March, 2009