Former UN Secretary-General and Nobel Peace Prize winner Kofi Annan has died at age 80, a UN agency confirmed Saturday.

Annan, who was born in Ghana in 1938, served as the seventh UN Secretary-General, from 1997 to 2006, and was the first to rise from within the ranks of the United Nations staff.

He had been a member of The Elders, a group of global leaders working for human rights, since it was founded in 2007. In 2013, he became its chairman.

The UN Migration Agency tweeted: “Today we mourn the loss of a great man, a leader, and a visionary.”

Annan was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with the United Nations in 2001 “for their work for a better organized and more peaceful world.”

He was married with three children.