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◦ Alex Counts, President
    ◦ Salvatore Pappalardo, COO
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    ◦ Si White, Acting CFO
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Grameen Foundation : Who we are : Our People : Staff : Alex Counts, President

Alex Counts, President & CEO

Sameer Sheikh, Assistant to the President

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. A 1988 Cornell University graduate, with a degree in economics, Counts’ commitment to poverty eradication deepened as a 1988-9 Fulbright scholar 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.

Counts founded Grameen Foundation (www.grameenfoundation.org) in 1997 with a mere $6,000 in seed capital and a charge from Dr. Yunus. This new organization was to play the role of catalyst, channeling human, financial and technological resources in the United States to support the growth of the poverty-focused microfinance movement internationally.

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 has propelled Grameen Foundation’s philosophy and approach through his writings on poverty and microcredit for the poor.  His latest work, Small Loans, Big Dreams: How Nobel Prize Winner Muhammad Yunus and Microfinance Are Changing the World, was published by John Wiley & Sons in April 2008.  He is also the author of Give Us Credit: How Muhammad Yunus' Microlending Revolution is Empowering Women from Bangladesh to Chicago, which was published by Random House in 1996. The Indian edition of this book was the inspiration behind the establishment of Grameen Koota, a microfinance institution in Bangalore, India, that was serving 110,000 women as of June 2007. He has been published in the Washington Post, the International Herald Tribune, the Miami Herald, the Christian Science Monitor and elsewhere.

Counts serves on the Board of Directors of several microfinance institutions. He chairs the board of Project Enterprise in New York City, and is vice-chair of the board of Fonkoze USA, which supports microfinance in Haiti. He also serves on the board of the PLAN Fund, a microfinance institution serving low-income people in Dallas, Texas. In addition, he is a member of the Board of Advisors of the Katalysis Bootstrap Fund and a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Grameen Dialogue. 

In 2007, he received the Horace Mann Alumni Association's Award for Distinguished Achievement.

Counts speaks fluent Bengali and lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife Emily and cat, Seymour.

*Figure accurate as of September, 2007

Note: This biographical sketch can be used for introducing Alex. It does not have to be read in its entirety.



Sameer Sheikh
Assistant to the President

Sameer Sheikh (ssheikh@grameenfoundation.org) is the Assistant to the President at Grameen Foundation. In joining Grameen Foundation, Sameer brings with him a wide spectrum of experience, namely having served as an Adviser to the President of the Economic and Social Council, at the United Nations, as well as on John Kerry’s Presidential Campaign, where he functioned in multiple capacities. Sameer graduated Cum Laude and with Honors from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.A. in Philosophy, Political Science and Economics, and has completed programs of study at La Sorbonne and l’Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris (Sciences-Po).

Grameen Foundation : Who we are : Our People : Staff : Alex Counts, President