On this day 6 years ago, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was sworn in as Liberia’s president, the first female elected head of state in Africa. She followed an extraordinary path to the presidency, having studied economics and accounting in Liberia and then undertaking further studies in the US in the 1960s and early 1970s before returning to Liberia to serve as Assistant Minister of Finance and subsequently Minister of Finance.
After a military coup in 1980, Sirleaf escaped to the US to work for the World Bank before becoming Vice President of the Citibank African Regional Office. While Liberia was gripped by civil war she served as assistant administrator then director of the UNDP’s Regional Bureau for Africa, and then in 1997 ran for president of Liberia, finishing a distant second to the warlord Charles Taylor, who is now being tried by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.
In the 2005 general election, Sirleaf was elected president after a close contest with football star George Weah. She was re-elected in 2011. Also in 2011 she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with Leymah Gbowee (also of Liberia) and Tawakel Karman of Yemen, “for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work”.