Abiy Ahmed

Biography

Abiy Ahmed was born in 1976 in Beshasha, Ethiopia, the son of a Muslim Oromo elder and his fourth wife. In early 1991, aged 14, he joined the armed struggle against the Derg alongside the Oromo People's Democratic Organization. He then served in the army's intelligence and communications units, with the UN mission in Rwanda in 1995 and in the 1998-2000 war with Eritrea.

In 2006 he was among the founders of the Information Network Security Agency, Ethiopia's signals intelligence body, where he was for a time acting director and rose to lieutenant colonel before leaving the military in 2010. Alongside his service he earned a computer engineering degree in 2009, a master's in transformational leadership from the University of Greenwich in 2011, an MBA in 2013 and a doctorate from Addis Ababa University in 2017.

Elected to parliament for Agaro in 2010, he was minister of science and technology in 2015-2016 and then deputy president of Oromia Region. After Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn resigned amid protests, the Oromo Democratic Party made Abiy its chairman in February 2018 and in March he won the ruling EPRDF's first contested leadership vote; parliament elected him prime minister on 2 April 2018.

He released thousands of political prisoners, ended the state of emergency, invited exiled opponents and media back, opened state firms to private investors and made peace with Eritrea, for which he received the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize. In December 2019 he replaced the EPRDF with his new Prosperity Party, which won the 2021 election. His government has since been marked by the 2020-2022 Tigray war, insurgencies in Amhara and Oromia, the arrest of journalists and serious human rights abuses.