Mr. Anir Chowdhury is the Policy Advisor of a2i, the Bangladesh government’s flagship digital transformation program, jointly implemented by the ICT Ministry and Cabinet Office with technical support from UNDP.
In this capacity, he leads the formation of a whole-of-society innovation ecosystem in Bangladesh through massive technology deployment, extensive capacity development, integrated policy formulation, whole-of-government institutional reform and an Innovation Fund. His work on innovation in public services 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. He is a regular speaker in international conferences on public service innovation and reform, digital financial inclusion, civil registration and digital identity management, data-driven policy making, SDGs, youth and community empowerment, educational transformation, public-private partnerships and South-South Cooperation.
Anir is a member of the Prime Minister’s Digital Bangladesh 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). 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.