"The most effective way for accelerating economic progress in the developing world is by empowering its emerging entrepreneurs and by leveraging technological innovation. We seek a balance in the debate on what constitutes effective development, which has traditionally been overwhelmingly out of balance in favor of top-down thinking" - Iqbal Quadir, Founder of GrameenPhone and Director of Legatum Center at MIT
Overview
The Legatum FORTUNE Technology Prize was founded upon the conviction that sustainable, scalable, technology-driven business enterprises offer the most effective means to promote prosperity and bring people out of poverty. A for-profit business approach has been shown to foster long-term economic development and wealth creation through individual ownership, the rewards of productivity and enhancement of economic opportunities.
The Legatum FORTUNE Technology Prize serves to seek out, recognise, and honour individuals and organisations that demonstrate the impact of technology upon intractable development issues, establishing these visionaries as role models for a world repeatedly failed by the old models of government aid and handouts.
By celebrating the success of these technological entrepreneurs, Legatum’s intention is to draw attention to the way in which technology can leverage the productive activities of entrepreneurs so as to accelerate the sustainable, business-based development of emerging communities. Such demonstrated success encourages an increased focus on, and investment in, technologies which can assist the development of impoverished people.
A Prize fund of USD 1,000,000 was awarded to organisations whose application of technology solutions has demonstrably improved the quality of life amongst impoverished populations. Nominated by a trusted network of technology experts, they were evaluated by a panel of eminent judges from the worlds of technology, business and development, whose experience encompasses grassroots development programmes, private equity investment, academia, and policy-making under the leadership of Iqbal Z. Quadir, Director of the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT.
Mr. Quadir is an accomplished entrepreneur, author and lecturer on the potential of bottom-up entrepreneurship and innovation. He is widely credited as being among the first to recognise the empowering potential of mobile telephony to unleash economic activity in developing countries, proven in his founding and development of the now multi-billion dollar GrameenPhone in Bangladesh.
Managed and audited by independent experts, the programme culminated in the presentation of the USD 1,000,000 Legatum FORTUNE Technology Prize at the FORTUNE 500 Forum in Washington DC, in early December 2008.
The winners of the 2008 Legatum FORTUNE Technology Prize were Comat Technologies (Pvt.) Ltd. and Microfinance International. For more information about the winners and finalists click here.
The original concept for the Prize was developed for Legatum and FORTUNE by S.E.VEN Fund, a virtual non-profit entity run by entrepreneurs whose strategy is to increase the rate of diffusion of enterprise-based solutions to poverty. For more information, please visit www.sevenfund.org
For more information about the Legatum FORTUNE Technology Prize, please contact:
Hamish Banks
Legatum
+971 4 317 5800
Hamish.Banks@legatum.com
Update: In order to improve upon the impact of the Technology Prize, we are currently reviewing the first year's learnings and therefore will not be conducting a Prize programme in 2009. Details of future programmes will be posted here in due course.