Alex Counts is President and CEO of Grameen Foundation, a dynamic nonprofit, Washington D.C.-based organization that has grown to a global network of 46 microfinance partners in 25 countries. Counts became Grameen Foundation's first Executive Director in 1997, after ten years of working in microfinance and poverty reduction, primarily in Bangladesh.
Today, under Counts' leadership, Grameen Foundation impacts an estimated 20 million lives in Asia, Africa, the Americas, and the Arab World.* Grameen Foundation's annual budget has grown in each year of its existence, from $100,000 in 1997 to over $13 million in 2006, and its breakthrough impact has been chronicled in the Economist and elsewhere.
Counts was a Fulbright scholar who spent time in Bangladesh, where he witnessed dire poverty as well as the innovative solutions that had been developed and applied on a wide scale by the Grameen Bank and other members of the Grameen family of companies. He trained under and worked closely with Dr. Muhammad Yunus, the founder and managing director of the Grameen Bank, and the 2006 Nobel Laureate.
In addition to working with Grameen Bank in 1988-89 and 1992-1994, he served for three years as the legislative director of RESULTS, an international grassroots citizen's lobbying group working to create the political will to end hunger that has played a leading role in advocating for increased funding and better targeting of resources to support global health, education and microfinance initiatives. He also served as a regional project manager for CARE-Bangladesh for two years.
Alex Counts is a Cornell University graduate, with a degree in economics.
Microfinance, the term didn't exist back when I was getting into the field, people talked about micro enterprise development and that was looking at this basically a very, very small business and services to support that business. There became a group of institutions that were specialized in provid...(Full transcript available to logged in subscribers.).
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