About Overview
The Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship was founded on the belief that economic progress and good governance in low-income countries emerge from entrepreneurship and innovations that empower ordinary citizens.
The Center was founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2007 through a structured gift of $50 million from Legatum, a global investment firm.
The Center administers programs and convenes events that promote and shape discourse on bottom-up development. Led by Iqbal Z. Quadir, founder of GrameenPhone and Emergence BioEnergy, the Center runs a highly competitive fellowship program for MIT graduate students who intend to launch enterprises in low-income countries. In addition, the Center convenes an annual conference, hosts lectures, and supports teams of enterprising men and women at MIT who are passionate about starting viable businesses in the developing world.
ABOUT MIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology - a coeducational, privately endowed research university—is dedicated to advancing knowledge and educating students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century. The Institute has more than 900 faculty and 10,000 undergraduate and graduate students. It is organized into five Schools—Architecture and Urban Planning; Engineering; Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences; Sloan School of Management; and Science. The website is located at http://www.mit.edu.
ABOUT LEGATUM
Legatum is a global investment organisation headquartered in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
Founded in 2006, Legatum draws on a twenty-year heritage of investment excellence in the global capital markets, allocating capital to support the development of companies, governments and markets across a wide range of sectors and geographies.
In addition to investing in global capital markets, Legatum is also committed to promoting sustainable human development and the expansion of knowledge and best practice across the globe. In addition to the Legatum Center at MIT, the Legatum Group includes:
A private portfolio investment firm that manages a multi-billion dollar fund investing only proprietary capital.
A research and advisory organisation whose mission is to identify and promote the principles that drive the
creation of global prosperity and the expansion of human liberty.
An organisation that promotes innovative ways to accelerate the creation of prosperity in local communities
around the world through grants that transcend the proven limitations of traditional, top-down aid programs.
A "double bottom line" investor which incubates and invests in entrepreneurs and for-profit enterprise
companies that produce extraordinary social returns while generating financial returns.
