Iqbal Z. Quadir

Professor Iqbal Z. Quadir is the founder and director of the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and founder of Grameenphone Limited in Bangladesh. For nearly twenty years, he has been advocating for the use of mobile phones to empower ordinary people in low-income countries and for commerce-based solutions for their advancement.

While pursuing a career in investment banking in New York in the early 1990s, Quadir recognized that the ensuing digital revolution could bring connectivity 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), which became the launch pad for Grameenphone, Bangladesh’s largest phone company providing access to over 22 million subscribers irrespective of their geographic location or economic standing.

From 2001-2004, Quadir taught at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, focusing on the democratizing effects of technologies in developing countries. In 2005, he moved to MIT where he co-founded the journal Innovations (MIT Press) and founded the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship, which promotes discourse and action on bottom-up development and administers a highly competitive fellowship for MIT graduate students who intend to launch enterprises in low-income counties.

Quadir holds both an MBA and an MA from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and a BS with honors from Swarthmore College.