# Elmira Ibraimova

Elmira Sultanovna Ibraimova (кирг. Эльмира Султан кызы Ибраимова; * April 13, 1962 in Frunze, Kyrgyzstan) is a former Kyrgyz civil servant, politician and deputy prime minister.
She is the youngest of three daughters of Sultan Ibraimov (1927 – 1980), Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Kirghiz Soviet Socialist Republic from 22 December 1978 until his assassination in 1980. Her sister Ainura, a health professional, served for a time as Kyrgyz deputy minister of health.

## Early Years

Elmira Sultanovna was born in Frunze while her father was minister of Land Reclamation and Water Management in the government of Bolot Mambetov. She studied at M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University in Moscow, Russia, and obtained there a Master's degree in political economics in June 1984. She then worked seven years (1984–1991) in an electronic machinery plant in Frunze, rising to senior economist in its research & development section. From 1986 to 1991 she was also second secretary of one of the district committees of the Komsomol in Frunze.

## Government Service

Following the Independence of the former Kirghiz Soviet Socialist Republic on December 15, 1990, as the Republic of Kyrgyzstan, she joined the Kyrgyz civil service in May 1991, where she served until October 1996. There she held various positions in the administration of the national Parliament, culminating with that of Head of the General Administration Department and then Chief of the Secretariat of the Legislative Chamber, the Jogorku Keņesh. This service was interrupted from September 1993 to April 1995 when she studied with a Muskie Fellowship at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Massachusetts and obtained there a Master's degree in Public Administration. From October 1996 until December 1998 she was Auditor of the Jogorku Kenesh in the Supreme Auditing Chamber of the Kyrgyz Republic, and subsequently from December 1998 to September 1999 she was Deputy Chief of the Foreign Policy Department in the Administration of the President of the Kyrgyz Republic.
From September 1999 through April 2001 she was her country's Permanent Representative and Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the United Nations in New York.
Following a year without a government appointment, she was named in May 2002 to head the preparation unit for the Village Investment Project under the Prime Minister's Administration, and from October 2003 until 2007 she was executive director of the Community Development and Investment Agency (Agentstvo Razvitiya i Investirovaniya Soobshestv – ARIS) of the Kyrgyz Republic, established to implement this and subsequent rural and community development projects. Under her leadership ARIS became the main agency for implementing foreign aided projects in the rural communities of the country. In 2005 Elmira Sultanovna was one of the recipients of the Prize for Women's Creativity in Rural Life, awarded annually by the Women's World Summit Foundation in Geneva, Switzerland.
When President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who had come to power in the wake of the Tulip Revolution in 2005, formed the Ak Jol party in October 2007, he asked her to join and to serve as one of its co-chairs. The party won 71 of the 90 seats in the Jogorku Keņesh in the 2007 elections, and Elmira Sultanovna became leader of its parliamentary faction. She subsequently served in Prime Minister Igor Chudinov’s cabinet first as Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs (2007-May 2008) and then as Deputy Prime Minister responsible for the social sectors. She resigned from this position in January 2009 over policy differences and was expelled from the Ak Jol party for publicly criticizing President Bakiyev's policies.
In the provisional government under President Roza Otunbayeva and Prime Minister Almazbek Atambayev of the Social Democratic Party of Kyrgyzstan, formed after the Kyrgyz Revolution of 2010 and governing until December 31, 2011, Elmira Sultanovna was briefly one of its members as Coordinator of the Social Sector, Public Relations and Mass Media, until she was reappointed in 2010 to her old position as executive director of ARIS. In November 2012 she was appointed chair of the Chamber of Accounts of the Kyrgyz Republic, where she served until retiring in 2016.