Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

Biography

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was born in Monrovia in 1938 and attended the College of West Africa from 1948 to 1955. Married at seventeen, she went to the United States with her husband in 1961 and earned an associate degree in accounting at Madison Business College in Wisconsin, then a BA in economics from the University of Colorado Boulder in 1970 and a Master of Public Administration from Harvard's Kennedy School in 1971.

Back in Liberia she served as assistant minister of finance under President William Tolbert, resigned after a dispute over spending, and returned as minister of finance in 1979. After Samuel Doe's coup of April 1980 she fled abroad, working for the World Bank in Washington and from 1981 as a vice president of Citibank's African regional office in Nairobi. Returning to contest the 1985 elections, she was sentenced to ten years in prison for sedition after criticising the regime and was jailed again after a failed coup that November, before leaving the country in 1986. From 1992 to 1997 she directed the UN Development Programme's Regional Bureau for Africa.

She finished second to Charles Taylor in the 1997 presidential election. Standing for the Unity Party, she won the 2005 election held after the civil wars and took office in January 2006 as the first elected female head of state in Africa. Her government sought debt relief and established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 and was re-elected later that year, chaired the Economic Community of West African States from 2016, and was succeeded by George Weah in January 2018.