Professor Iqbal Z. Quadir, Founder and Director
Professor of the Practice of Development and Entrepreneurship, MIT
Founder and Director, The Legatum Center, MIT
Iqbal Z. Quadir is a Professor of the Practice of Development and Entrepreneurship and Founder and Director of the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT. He is also the founder of Grameenphone in Bangladesh. For two decades, he has been advocating for the critical role of entrepreneurship and innovations in creating prosperity in low-income countries.
Quadir’s childhood exposure to the conditions in rural Bangladesh combined with his later venture capital experience in New York led him to recognize in the early 1990s that the ensuing digital revolution could facilitate the introduction of telephone access to 100 million people living in rural Bangladesh. To make this vision a reality, he established a New York based company, Gonofone Development Corp (meaning “phones for the masses” in Bengali), and assembled a global consortium of Gonofone, micro-credit pioneer Grameen Bank of Bangladesh, and Norwegian telecommunications company Telenor to create Grameenphone. Grameenphone is now Bangladesh’s leading telecommunications operator and provides access to over 35 million subscribers irrespective of their geographic location or economic standing.
From 2001-2004, Quadir was a Fellow and Lecturer at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, focusing on the democratizing effects of technologies in low-income countries. He co-founded the journal Innovations (MIT Press) and, in 2005, moved to MIT where he founded the Legatum Center in 2007. Quadir founded Emergence BioEnergy to produce decentralized energy, and recently co-founded Money in Motion, a start-up company to provide mobile phone-based banking services. He sits on the Advisory Council of the World Wide Web Foundation.
The World Economic Forum selected Quadir as a “Global Leader for Tomorrow” in 1999. Quadir is also the recipient of the prestigious Science, Education and Economic Development award in Bangladesh, and was listed as one of 125 Influential People and Ideas on the occasion of the 125-year celebration of the Wharton School. In 2011, he received the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from Swarthmore College and the honorary degree of Doctor of Science from Case Western Reserve University. He holds both an MBA and an MA from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and a BS with honors from Swarthmore College.