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How Kofi Annan rose to become UN General-Secretary and served two terms

He became the seventh General Secretary of the United Nations (UN), working tirelessly to bring peace to war ravaged countries.

His death, according to his family in a statement from the Kofi Annan Foundation, was after a short illness.

Often described as the "moral voice of the world," Mr Annan a Noble Peace Prize winner.

How did Kofi Annan rise to prominence  and became the UN General Secretary for two terms?

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Kofi Annan was born on April 8, 1938 in Kumasi when Ghana, then Gold Coast, was under British colonial rule. He was born into aristocratic family, had three sisters, two of them older and the third, Efua, his twin. His grandfathers were traditional rulers and his father was a provincial governor under British rule.

He had his secondary education at Mfantsipim Senior High School, studied at the University of Ghana before moving to Geneva to study at the Macalester College in St. Paul and at the M.I.T Slogan School of Management.

He got his first job at a UN  agency  in 1962, as a budget officer with the World Health Organisation, worked in Ethiopia with the UN Economic Commission for Africa before returning to the body's Europe headquarters.

By 1993, he was appointed the under secretary-general and head of peacekeeping at the UN by former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros Ghali of Egypt.

In 1997, he became the first black African to be appointed as the UN General-Secretary, inheriting an organisation that was on a brink of bankruptcy.

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He reformed the organisation, got member states  to take responsibility for the tragedies across the world and the United States to pay a blacklog of debt owed the UN.

In 2001, Annan and the UN were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

The award, which citation praised Annan for bring "new life to the organisation (UN)," propelled him to secure a second term mandate as UN General-Secretary.

Kofi Annan described his greatest achievement as the Millennium Development Goals, which - for the first time - set global targets on issues such as poverty and child mortality. The drive is widely regarded as a success, according to the BBC.

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On his watch as what the Nobel committee called Africa’s foremost diplomat, Al Qaeda struck New York and Washington, the United States invaded Iraq, and Western policymakers turned their sights from the Cold War to globalization and the struggle with Islamic militancy, according to the New York Times.

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