Kofi Annan
BORN: April 8, 1938,
Kumasi, Gold Coast [now
Ghana]
Kofi Atta Annan, (1938) served as
the seventh Secretary General of the
United Nations (UN), born in Ghana
and educated in the United States.
He happens to be the first UN
Secretary General from the sub-
Saharan Africa. Annan began serving
his first five-year term in 1997. In
2001, the UN General Assembly
unanimously elected him to a
second term, beginning in 2002.
Annan was born in Kumasi, Ghana.
In 1961, he received a bachelor’s
degree in economics from
Macalester College in Saint Paul,
Minnesota. After ten years of service
with the UN, he attended the
Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, where he received a
master’s degree in Management in
1972.
Annan joined the UN in 1962 as a
budget officer with the UN’s World
Health Organization (WHO). He later
managed budgetary and personnel
operations for the Office of the
United Nations High Commissioner
for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Office
of Financial Services.
Between 1987 and 1992, Annan
served as an Assistant Secretary
General in a variety of posts,
including the Office of Human
Resources Management and Security
Coordination and the Office of
Program Planning, Budget, and
Finance. From 1992 until his
election as UN Secretary General,
Annan served as the Assistant
Secretary General and Under
Secretary General for UN
peacekeeping operations. Annan and
the UN were the co-recipients of the
2001 Nobel Peace Prize .
Annan assumed responsibility for
the UN peacekeeping operations in a
period when localised conflicts,
fuelled by nationalism and tension
between ethnic groups, had flared up
in many parts of the world. During
the early and mid-1990s, the UN
organised an increasing number of
peacekeeping operations in nations,
such as Cambodia, Haiti, and Bosnia.
The major challenge Annan faced
was to secure funding for these
operations in a period of diminished
international financial and political
support for the activities of the UN,
particularly from the United States.
Between 1990 and 1996, the United
States held back more than a billion
dollars in dues owed to the UN to
emphasise the need for bureaucratic
and financial reform within the
organisation. In 1996, the United
States blocked the re-election of
former secretary General Boutros
Boutros-Ghali, whom many U.S.
government officials believed was
hostile to reform of the UN. With
more than three decades of service
to the UN, Annan became the first
career UN official to be elected the
Secretary General.
As secretary general, Annan
reorganised the management of the
UN in order to increase efficiency
and reduce costs, and he improved
the organisation’s relationship with
the United States. He has
rededicated the UN to its traditional
goals of economic development,
social justice and international
peace. Annan has placed particular
importance on combating the
epidemic of Acquired
Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS)
and improving human rights
worldwide.
Did You Know?
Kofi Annan was a self-confident
leader even as a teenager, and
undertook his first successful
human rights mission when he went
for a hunger strike at the boarding
school to protest against the poor
quality of food there.
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