Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai - Early Years

Early Years

Ghani was born in 1949 in the logar Province of Afghanistan. An ethnic Pashton, Pakhtun from an influential Ahmadzai family, he completed his primary and secondary education in Habibia High School in Kabul. He travelled to Lebanon to attend the American University in Beirut and earned his first degree in 1973. During his stay there he met his future wife, Rula Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai was elected for the UN post, has ranked second rank in the UN election he is a well famous economist of Afghanistan and well known abroad. he has also taught in the Harvard University in the U.S. He returned to Afghanistan in 1974 to teach Afghan studies and anthropology at Kabul University before winning a government scholarship to study for a Master's degree in anthropology at Columbia University in the United States. He left Afghanistan in 1977, intending to be away for two years.

When the PDPA communist party came to power in Kabul, most of the male members of his family were imprisoned and Ahmadzai was stranded in America. He stayed at Columbia University and earned his PhD in Cultural Anthropology there, and was immediately invited to teach at University of California, Berkeley (1983) and then at Johns Hopkins University (1983–1991). During this period he became a frequent commentator on the BBC Dari and Pashto services, broadcast in Afghanistan. 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. 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 each in 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.