I first got to know Iqbal Quadir in March 2002, traveling from Boston to Monterrey, Mexico, for the International Conference on Financing for Development. He was a fellow business interlocutor, invited to represent the views of private businesses and foreign investors, groups typically ignored by the Bretton Woods institutions (the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the United Nations), the conference sponsors. The invitation, although largely ceremonial, signified a growing recognition that private investment was a key driver of economic growth in poor countries. The event took place in the shadow of the riots in Seattle in 1999 protesting World Trade Organization (WTO) policies, the follow-on antiglobalization protests, and finally, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

The general thinking behind the invitation was that poverty was a root cause of antiglobalists’ anger and anti-West terrorism, that economic growth reduces poverty, and that private investment was needed to spark sustainable growth. Aid alone clearly had not done the trick.

Growth doesn’t always translate directly into poverty reduction of course, as gains are never evenly distributed. But studies indicate that on average every extra 1 percent of GDP growth (moving from, say, 2 percent to 3 percent growth) reduces poverty by 2 percent. Hundreds of millions have been lifted out of poverty in China and India alone since 1990, due to fast and steady economic growth driven almost exclusively by investment, not aid. Over the last decade in South Asia, where growth rates have averaged better than 5 percent per year, poverty fell in Bangladesh, India, and Nepal by 9, 10, and 11 percentage points, respectively.

Quadir (pronounced “ka-deer”) was the visionary and catalyst behind the creation of what would become GrameenPhone in Bangladesh–a cell phone company built by Norway’s Telenor AS in conjunction with Bangladesh’s fabled microlender, Grameen Bank. In a country with a per capita GDP of about $1 a day, one of the lowest phone penetration rates in the world, and a government widely perceived to be the most corrupt in the world, GrameenPhone is a wildly successful business.

Thanks largely to GrameenPhone the penetration rate of phones in Bangladesh has increased fortyfold in the last decade, to 10 per 100 people, although that is still lower than the rate in some African countries. GrameenPhone holds the dominant share (63 percent) in an increasingly competitive telecom market and is the best-known brand in the land.

A major factor in the company’s success is its Village Phone program, whose 260,00 “pnone ladies” deliver phones to most of the 68,000 villages of Bangladesh, which have never before had phones. GrameenPhone’s method of distribution and its motto–”good business is good development”–could be an example and a motto for the power of inclusive capitalism.

“We put technology in the hands of people,” as Quadir explains it. “Whatever people do with the phones, it’s good for them, good for the country. Phones bring people together in collaboration, cooperation.”