About
- Anir Chowdhury is a global leader, practitioner, advisor, speaker and writer in public digital transformation and institutional reform. He advises governments, development agencies, and philanthropies on reimagining public institutions through innovative approaches, tools, and partnerships. Anir combines his tech startup experience in the US with policy advisory expertise in developing countries of Asia and Africa with UNDP
- Over two decades, he drove whole-of-society innovation ecosystems through digital public infrastructure, massive capacity building of demand and supply sides, policy integration across 50 ministries, institutional reform of dozens of service delivery organizations, and innovative financing. His work in Bangladesh has saved billions of dollars for millions of marginalized citizens by transforming a traditional, rules-driven bureaucracy into a people-centric, responsive service provider through public-private partnerships.
- Anir has dedicated his work to addressing structural biases in digital systems that too often benefit the ruling, the rich, and the related (the tyranny of the 3R) at the expense of the recipient (the forgotten R that only exists in rhetoric). His research has demonstrated 4 major areas that need intervention: phygital access, digital and AI skills, human-centered design of digital systems, and power asymmetry in society.
- As a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Centre Fellow, he is blending his bottom-up in-the-trenches learning with his top-down policy experience from Ministerial task forces, WEF/UN/WB committees, and distilling that into a book and AI-enabled playbook for digital transformation of nations to benefit the marginalized disproportionately.
- He dedicated the first half of his career in co-founding and running technology startups – both for profit and non-profits – in Boston, New York and Virginia, and in Bangladesh focused on improving efficiency of large corporations by making their technology production environment more robust and fault-free.
- Anir graduated magna cum laude in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics from Brown University and pursued postgraduate studies at Harvard, Columbia, Oxford, Bradford and Boston Universities., A Chevening Fellow and Honorary Professor at UCL’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, he continues to shape global development through thoughts, actions, and partnerships -- always committed to leaving no one behind.