Market Building Initiative

Program Directors

Ashraf Ghani is co-director of the Market Building Initiative as well as Chairman of the Institute for State Effectiveness, established to develop innovative approaches to the issue of state functionality in the contemporary world. As Adviser to the UN Secretary General he advised on the Bonn Agreement for Afghanistan and then as Afghanistan's Finance Minister he is credited with a series of successful reforms in Afghanistan, including reform of the treasury, customs, budget and the currency. He prepared Afghanistan's first National Development Framework and Securing Afghanistan's Future, a $28bn reconstruction program for the country and later served as Chancellor of Kabul University.  He was educated at the American University Beirut and Colombia University, and taught at Johns Hopkins and Berkeley Universities before joining the World Bank, where for a decade he led work on country strategies and policies. He was recently endorsed by the Wall Street Journal for the post of UN Secretary General and by the New York Times for the post of President of the World Bank. He has written a book with Clare Lockhart, entitled Fixing Failed States, published by Oxford University Press in May 2008.

Clare Lockhart, Director of the Market Building Initiative and co-founder and Director of the Institute for State Effectiveness, is a specialist in law and public administration trained at Oxford and Harvard. After working as an investment banker and barrister in London, she managed a program on state transition at the World Bank. She was then recruited as a UN advisor in Afghanistan during the Bonn process and advisor to the Government of Afghanistan during the Transitional Administration, designing and managing a series of national initiatives. While still in Afghanistan, she - with Dr. Ghani and a number of colleagues - began to codify this learning and advising high-level policy-makers in other transitional states.