Ashraf Ghani

Mohammad Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai (born 19 May 1949) is an Afghan former politician and economist who served as the 8th and last president of Afghanistan from 2014 until his government was overthrown by the Taliban in 2021.

Ghani was born in Logar, then part of the Kingdom of Afghanistan. After his grade-school education in Afghanistan, he spent much of his time abroad, studying in Lebanon and the United States. After receiving his PhD in cultural anthropology from Columbia University in 1983, he taught at various institutions and was an associate professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. For much of the 1990s, he worked at the World Bank. In December 2001, he returned to Afghanistan after the collapse of the Taliban government. He then served as finance minister in Hamid Karzai's cabinet. He resigned in December 2004 to become the dean of Kabul University. In 2009, Ghani ran in the 2009 Afghan presidential election but came in fourth.