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Backgrounder: Somalia's newly elected president

Xinhua, February 9, 2017 Adjust font size:

Former Prime Minister Mohamed Abdullahi Farmajo has been elected the new president of Somalia after the incumbent Hassan Sheikh Mohamud conceded defeat after two rounds of voting.

Farmajo was born in 1962 in Mogadishu to a family originally from Gedo in south-western Somalia.

He got his primary and secondary education in Mogadishu before starting his first job at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Somalia.

Between 1985 and 1989 he served as the first secretary at the Somali embassy in Washington DC.

In 1989, he left to pursue a bachelor's degree in history at the University of Buffalo in New York. During this time, Farmajo applied for political asylum in the United States after the Somali government collapsed in 1991.

He continued his studies at the University of Buffalo and obtained a master's degree in political sciences and international relations.

Upon acquiring American citizenship, he went on to hold several jobs in New York state, including at the Buffalo Municipal Housing Authority, the Erie County Division of Equal Employment Opportunity and the New York State Department of Transportation.

President Sheikh Sharif Ahmed appointed Farmajo as prime minister in October 2010 to succeed Omar Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke, who resigned from his post following a dispute.

Farmajo resigned from this post in June 2011 under pressure from the international community as part of the Kampala Accord between President Ahmed and the Speaker of Parliament, during which the mandate of the transitional institutions was extended to August 20, 2012.

In 2011, Farmajo founded a new political party, the Somali Justice and Equality Party, also known as Tayo.

Farmajo is currently the secretary general of Tayo party, which is chaired by Mariam Qasim, his former minister of women's affairs. Tayo is the first Somali political party headed by a woman. Enditem