Rafael Vicente Correa Delgado (born 6 April 1963) is the President of the Republic of Ecuador and the current President pro tempore of the Union of South American Nations. An economist educated in Ecuador, Belgium and the United States, he briefly served as his country's Finance Minister in 2005. He was elected President in late 2006 and took office in January 2007. In December 2008, he declared Ecuador's national debt illegitimate because it was contracted by corrupt/despotic prior regimes, pledging to fight creditors in international courts. He brought Ecuador into the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas in June 2009. Correa has described himself as a "humanist and Christian of the left". Correa was re-elected to a second term in April 2009, and was sworn in on 10 August 2009.

Correa was born in Guayaquil and earned an Economics degree at the Universidad Católica Santiago de Guayaquil in 1987. Following his degree, he worked for one year in a mission at a welfare center run by the Salesian order in Cotopaxi Province, where he acquired some knowledge of Kichwa, the language of the majority of the native pre-Columbian population concentrated in the Andes region. In addition to Spanish, he speaks French, Quechua, and English.

In June 1991, he received a Master of Arts in Economics from the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium. He later studied at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he earned a Master of Science in Economics in May 1999, and later a PhD in Economics in October 2001. According to The Washington Post, Correa's adviser at the University of Illinois, Werner Baer, supports his former student. "He appreciates the market to a certain point, but he knows that the market left alone concentrates wealth", he said. "He is not going to do anything foolish... because he is a fairly open-minded person."