The Asia Foundation

Expertise: Economic Reform and Development, Poverty Reduction, Economic Governance, Food Security, SMEs, Bangladesh

Farouk Chowdhury is a Senior Economist at The Asia Foundation with more than 30 years of experience in education, economic policy analysis, economic development programming, and empirical research and analysis. He supports The Foundation's Bangladesh office on program development and implementation in the fields of economic governance, poverty reduction, food security, small and medium enterprise development, agriculture and agro-industries, export garment sector competitiveness, community-oriented policing, elections and eGovernance. He is responsible for the design and implementation of empirical research studies undertaken to inform or monitor The Foundation programs in economic governance, elections, poverty reduction, food security, SME development, access to justice, Islam, and community-oriented policing. Mr. Chowdhury also directs the KATALYST economic governance project implemented by The Foundation. It aims to increase competitiveness of SMEs in small urban and rural areas through enhancing their capacity to advocate for public benefit services from local governments and large business management organizations.

Prior to joining the Foundation, Mr. Chowdhury served for 10 years as Economist with USAID and is familiar with all dimensions of USAID programming. Subsequent to that, he worked for four years at the World Bank, Dhaka as Senior Economist. Mr. Chowdhury has done extensive consulting work for a number of organizations including the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS), DFID, FAO (Rome) and IFAD (Rome).

Education: M.A. in Economics from Dhaka University, Bangladesh, and Post-graduate studies in Economics (ABD) from University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada.