Anir Chowdhury is the Policy Advisor of the government of Bangladesh’s flagship digital transformation programme Aspire to Innovate (a2i) at the ICT Division and the Cabinet Division, supported by the 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 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. He is a regular speaker at international conferences and an international writer on large-scale national digital transformation, public service innovation and reform, digital financial inclusion, civil registration and digital identity management, SDGs, youth and community empowerment, educational transformation, public-private partnerships, and South-South Cooperation.

He is a member of the Prime Minister’s Smart Bangladesh Task Force, Education Minister’s National Blended Education Task Force, Global Digital Inclusion Partnership’s Advisory Council, Programme Committee of UN World Data Forum, and WEF and UNICEF’s Knowledge and Information Network for Digital Learning and Education’s Steering Committee. He is a Deputy Champion of WEF’s EDISON Alliance to improve education, healthcare, and financial services for 1 billion people worldwide, and the Co-Chair of WEF’s Regional Action Group for Digital Transformation. He is the Co-Founder and Board Member of South-South Network for Public Service Innovation (SSN4PSI) and Co-Founder of the Future of Work Lab in Asia Pacific. He co-founded several software and service companies and non-profit organizations in the US and Bangladesh. Anir graduated magna cum laude in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics from Brown University and did post-graduate work on management, marketing, educational transformation, and public sector reform in Harvard, Columbia, Boston, Bradford, and Oxford universities. He was a Chevening Fellow and a Visiting Fellow of Practice at Oxford. He is currently an Honorary Professor at the Institute of Innovation and Public Purpose at University College London.