Mr. Anir Chowdhury is the Policy Advisor of UNDP and USAID-supported a2i Program, Prime Minister’s Office, Bangladesh. In this capacity, he leads the formation of an innovation ecosystem in Bangladesh through massive capacity development, policy formulation, institutional reform and a Service Innovation Fund. His work on innovation in public service has developed interesting and replicable models of service delivery decentralization, public-private partnerships and transformation of a traditional bureaucracy into a forward-looking, citizen-centric service provider.
Anir is a member of the Prime Minister’s National Digital Task Force, Education Minister’s National ICT in Education Task Force, Planning Minister’s National Information Management Committee, and Cabinet Secretary’s National Steering Committee on Civil Registry and Vital Statistics (CRVS). In his twenty-three year career, he co-founded several software and service companies in the US and Bangladesh focused on enterprise management and IT strategy for Fortune 500 corporations. He also co-founded a number of non-profit organizations focused on ICT4D, e-learning and open source technologies. Anir graduated magna cum laude in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics from Brown University and did post-graduate work on management, marketing and education reform in Harvard, Columbia and Boston Universities. His interests include co-creation of e- and m-services, crowdsourcing, education reform, wide-scale adoption of open source and open content, public-private partnerships and youth development.