Telecoms entrepreneur and philanthropist Mo Ibrahim founded Celtel, which operated in several sub-Saharan African countries until its sale to Mobile Telecommunications Company (MTC), now Kuwait’s Zain Group, in 2005 for $3.4bn. Although Ibrahim remained on the board of Celtel, he set up the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, which monitors the quality of governance in Africa, and the Mo Ibrahim Index, designed to evaluate nations’ performance. He is a member of the Africa Regional Advisory Board of the London Business School.
Ibrahim was born in North Sudan and started out working at the country’s postal service. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Alexandria but moved to the UK to get a master’s degree from the University of Bradford and a PhD in mobile communications from the University of Birmingham. While working as an academic at the University of Greenwich, he was asked to join BT as a technical director and engineer advising on the launch of the company’s first mobile service. In 1989 he formed his own company, MSI, with $50,000 in savings, and sold it a few years later for about $1bn. He lives in Monaco.
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