A version of this article appeared in the August 2003 issue of Harvard Business Review.
Bottom-Up Economics
Bangladeshi villagers with cell phones helped build what’s now a thriving $200 million company. What’s the lesson for the developed world?
Summary.
Reprint: F0308C
Iqbal Quadir, the founder of Bangladesh’s GrameenPhone, discusses the failure of foreign aid to rescue moribund third-world economies and the need to empower local entrepreneurs. The most important feature of his company, he explains, isn’t the phone system itself but the microloans that mobilize an army of individual entrepreneurs to profitably meet an unsatisfied need.