Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

Liberia

Caught in a cycle of violence for some 25 years, Liberia has seen more than 200,000 people killed and half a million displaced, out of a pre-war population of three million. After the 1997 general elections, low-intensity conflict took hold and spread to neighboring countries. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was not insulated from her country’s violence: During the 1980 coup d’etat, she was one of only four government ministers to escape assassination, and she has twice been imprisoned for her politics. Over the course of her career, she has held such prominent positions as minister of finance of Liberia, president of the Liberia Bank for Development and Investment, and senior loan officer of the World Bank. Ms. Johnson Sirleaf has represented Liberia on the boards of the International Monetary Fund and the African Development Bank; she also served five years as assistant administrator and director of the regional bureau for Africa of the United Nations Development Programme. In the 1997 elections, she ran as a presidential candidate, finishing second in a field of thirteen. She founded and continues to support Measuagoon, a community development organization with projects throughout Liberia. She is the recipient of numerous international honors, including the Grand Commander Star of Africa Redemption of Liberia (1980), the Franklin D. Roosevelt Freedom of Speech Award of the United States (1988), and Commandeur de l’Ordre du Mono of Togo (1996). She holds a master of public administration from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Ms. Johnson Sirleaf’s peace-building activities include:

• investigating the Rwandan genocide in 1999 as one of seven international “Eminent Personalities” selected by the Organization of African Unity—the group later published the report The Preventable Genocide;
• co-authoring Women, War and Peace: The Independent Experts’ Assessment on the Impact of Armed Conflict on Women and Women’s Role in Peace-building (2002), a project of the United Nations Development Fund for Women; and
• chairing the board of directors of the Open Society Institute for West Africa (OSIWA), which disburses $10 million per year in grants to organizations working in the areas of human rights (including women’s political and economic empowerment), democracy and governance, media and technology (including information and communications technologies), legal reform and transitional justice, and HIV/AIDS.

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