Kofi Atta Annan did not begin his illustrious UN career on the political or diplomatic side of the ledger. Rather, he was a competent manager of human and financial resources. After graduating from Macalester College in Minnesota, USA and post-graduate studies at the Graduate Institute for International Studies in Geneva in the early 1960s, Annan joined the World Health Organization in Geneva, at the lowest professional entry level of “P-1” and later transferred to the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He later returned to school as a mid-career student at the Sloan School of Management at the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he obtained a Master of Science degree in Management in 1972.
He subsequently served in the UN peacekeeping mission that supervised the truce between Israel and the Arab States in the Middle East, as a senior manager in the UN Joint Staff Pension Fund in New York, and as Chief of Personnel at the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva. In the mid-1980s he became Director of Personnel at UN Headquarters in New York and, in 1990, Annan was appointed Assistant Secretary-General and the United Nations Controller with responsibility for the budget and fiscal management of the world body.
Kofi Annan’s political career really took off when UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali made him Assistant Secretary-General in the peacekeeping department and later promoted him to Under-Secretary-General and head of UN peacekeeping. This was historic because that important part of the UN’s work had hitherto been led exclusively by officials of American and British nationality since the organization was founded in 1945.