2nd February.

 
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is internationally known as Africa’s “Iron Lady”. She is a  Africa’s first democratically elected female head of state, who led Liberia through reconciliation and recovery following the nation’s decade-long civil war, as well as the Ebola crisis, winning international acclaim for achieving economic, social, and political change.

Sirleaf was born on 29 October 1938 in Monrovia, Liberia. She is the first elected female head of state in Africa. She led Liberia as President from 2006 to 2017.

Sirleaf is a Harvard-trained economist. Initially she was educated at the College of West Africa before moving to the United States where she earned an accounting degree at Madison Business College and a Masters Degree in Public Administration from Harvard University. She returned to Liberia to work in former President William Tolbert’s government as Assistant Minister of Finance from 1973 to 1974 and Minister of Finance from 1979 to 1980.

In 1980, Samuel Doe became the President. Sirleaf fled to the United States to work for Citibank and then the Equator Bank. She returned to Liberia contest for a senatorial seat for Montserrado County in 1985, the election that was disputed. In her efforts to bring justice to her people in Liberia, She was arrested as a result of her open criticism of the military government in 1985 and was sentenced to ten years imprisonment, although she was later released after a year. Sirleaf continued to be involved in politics.

In 1997, she contested as a presidential candidate but came second in the election, which was won by Charles Taylor. She campaigned relentlessly for Taylor’s removal from office and played an active and supportive role in the Transitional Government until she resigned in March 2004 to accept the nomination of the Unity Party of Liberia as the party’s leader. In October of 2005 the country prepared for elections.

In November 2005, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was elected President of Liberia and became the first woman to lead an African nation. In the elections she defeated popular world-class soccer star George Weah with an impressive 59.4 percent of the vote.

In October 2007, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civil award, for her personal courage and unwavering commitment to expanding freedom and improving the lives of people in Liberia and across Africa. And in 2010, as the only female and African Head of State, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was named by Newsweek Magazine as one of the World Top Ten Leaders.

She was re-elected in November 2011. During her two terms as President, she focused on rebuilding the country and also the foreign direct investment. She also attracted million in private resources to rebuild schools, clinics, and markets, and fund scholarships for capacity building. She successfully negotiated relief from $4.6 billion in external debt and succeeded in lifting UN trade sanctions, which allowed Liberia to once again access international markets. She increased the national budget from $80 million in 2006 to over $672 million in 2012, with an average annual GDP growth rate of more than seven percent.

In May 2012, she was appointed Co-Chair of the United Nations Secretary General’s High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda, tasked with crafting a roadmap for global recovery and sustainable developmentoals. In June 2016, Sirleaf was elected the first female Chairperson of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) for a 12-month term.

Prior to her presidency, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf served as Assistant Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme and as Director of its Regional Bureau for Africa, with the rank of Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations, a post she resigned to contest the 1997 presidential elections.

As a global leader for women’s empowerment, Johnson Sirleaf was awarded the prestigious Nobel Prize for Peace in 2011. She is the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Sirleaf has been named one of Forbes’  “100 Most Powerful Women in the World,” the most powerful woman in Africa (Forbes Africa, 2011), one of six “Women of the Year” (Glamour, 2010), among the 10 best leaders in the world (Newsweek, 2010) and top 10 female leaders (TIME, 2010). In 2010, The Economist called her “the best President the country has ever had.”

President Sirleaf has been awarded honorary doctorates by more than 15 institutions, including: Tilburg University (Netherlands), the Nigerian Defence Academy, the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Harvard University, Rutgers University, Yale University, Georgetown University, the University of Abeokuta (Nigeria), the University of Minnesota, Furman University of South Carolina, Brown University, Indiana University, Dartmouth College, Concordia University, Langston University, Spelman College, and Marquette University.

President Sirleaf has written widely on financial, development, and human rights issues, and in 2008 she published her critically acclaimed memoir, This Child Will Be Great. She is the proud mother of four sons and grandmother of 12.