Who became the President of Liberia in 2006 and was the first-ever woman to be elected head of State in the African continent?

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is the 24th President of the Republic of Liberia and the first elected female Head of State in Africa. She is serving her second term as President after winning the 2011 presidential election.

After decades of fighting for freedom, justice and equality in Liberia, in 2011 President Sirleaf shared the prestigious Nobel Prize for Peace with two other women – fellow Liberian Leymah Gbowee, and Tawakkul Karman of Yemen. They were recognized, by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work.

Among her other distinguished honors are: France’s highest award and public distinction, the Grand Croix of the Légion d’Honneur (2012), and the Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Development (2012). In 2007 she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor bestowed by an American President.

Born Ellen Eugenia Johnson in Monrovia on October 29, 1938, she is the granddaughter of a traditional chief of renown in western Liberia and a market woman from the southeast. She grew up in Liberia and attended high school at the College of West Africa in Monrovia, subsequently studying at Madison (Wisconsin) Business College, the University of Colorado and Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government where she obtained a Master’s Degree in Public Administration in 1971.

Picture Credit : Google

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