2008 Speaker
Chairman, President of Afghanistan

Ashraf Ghani is currently Chairman of the Institute for State Effectiveness. As Advisor to the UN Secretary-General he advised on the Bonn Agreement for Afghanistan. As Afghanistan’s Finance Minister he is credited for a series of successful reforms in Afghanistan, including reform of the Treasury, Customs, Budget and the Currency. He prepared Afghanistan’s first National Development Framework and Securing Afghanistan’s Future, a $28 billion reconstruction program for the country. As Chancellor of Kabul University, he instituted a style of participatory governance to enlist the students in managing their university’s transformation. Dr. Ghani is involved on the advisory boards for a number of activities supporting the reform of global institutions, including the Commission on the UN High-Level Panel on Legal Empowerment of the Poor, IDEA, Brookings Institution’s project on global insecurity, the Atlantic Council and the World Justice Project of the American Bar Association. He is a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Brookings Institution. In 2006 Dr. Ghani was nominated by President Hamid Karzai for the role of UN Secretary-General, and in 2007 he was also endorsed by the New York Times for the post of President of the World Bank. He was educated at Kabul University, American University Beirut and Columbia University, and taught at Johns Hopkins and Berkeley Universities before joining the World Bank, where he led work on country strategies and policies. His book, Fixing Failed States, written with Clare Lockhart, will soon be published by Oxford University Press.