Ajmal Ahmady

He left Afghanistan on August 15, 2021, and is now a M-RCBG Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Despite challenging circumstances, Governor Ahmady was able to maintain macroeconomic stability, including bringing inflation down from double digits to only 1.6% (as of July 2021), proving strong oversight of the financial sector, and inaugurating a real-time gross settlement (RTGS) system in December 2020. Governor Ahmady launched a successful mobile payments system, and was in the process of nationally launching the program when the Taliban overthrew the government.

He negotiated an IMF Extended Credit Facility (ECF) program and loan of $370 million in November 2021 and led the successful first review of the program in June 2021.

Ahmady left Afghanistan on an American military flight on 15 August, as the Islamic Republic collapsed in light of the 2021 Taliban offensive. As he left he posted his final experiences in a tweet that went viral.

To improve trade, Ahmady created and was instrumental in leading Afghanistan's National Air Corridor Program that now exports $100 million per year to more than 50 markets around the world and renegotiating a number of transit agreements that should help to reduce transit costs for traders and helped export $1 billion for the first time in the country's history (2020).

Based on presidential decree 544 on 3 June 2020, Ahmady was appointed Acting Governor of Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB), the central bank of Afghanistan, which regulates all banking and money handling operations in Afghanistan. His responsibilities included managing monetary policy, financial sector supervision, financial intelligence, payment systems, and banking operations.

He has also attended multilateral forums including the IMF 2020 Annual Meetings, the 2018 Geneva Conference on Afghanistan, and the World Bank Seminar on Policy Challenges for the Financial Sector; as well as spoken at numerous think tanks, including describing economic reforms at the Wilson Center (2018), investment opportunities at the Heritage Foundation (2019), and the collapse of the government at the Atlantic Council (2021).

Due to Ahmady's efforts, Afghanistan became the World Bank's largest business reformer in 2018. This included a significant increase in Afghanistan's position in the following categories: protecting minority investors, resolving insolvency, and starting a business.

He contributed to Afghanistan's anti-corruption agenda by drafting the national anti-corruption strategy and followed up with key anti-corruption benchmarks. He represented Afghanistan at the 18th International Anti-Corruption Conference in Copenhagen, where he sat on a panel with then World Bank CEO Kristalina Georgia and other dignitaries.

He was born in Afghanistan and grew up in the United States. He studied at Harvard University, and worked in the fields of economic development and investment management before returning to Afghanistan in 2014 to work in senior positions within the Afghan government.

Upon graduating from Harvard University, Ahmady spent eight years in the asset management industry investing in global macro and emerging market strategies. He began as a fixed income corporate bond analyst at T. Rowe Price (2008-2009), became a sovereign CEEMA analyst at Acadian Asset Management (2009-2012), and was the sole global economist and conducted trades at various emerging market funds at Fortress Investment Group (2012-2014).

Mr. Ahmady has had an extensive career at the intersection of economic development, asset management, and policy. He worked as a Microfinance Peace Corps Volunteer in the city of Kumba in Cameroon (2001-2003), the World Bank (2004), as a Senior Advisor at the Afghan Ministry of Finance (2004-2005), the US Treasury Department within the Office of International Monetary Policy researching sovereign debt restructurings (2005), ACAP Partners - an emerging markets private equity group, and Booz Allen Hamilton (2007).