Nicholas Sullivan
Author & Writer: Business, Technology, & Development
From 2011-2015, Sullivan was co-founder of and Senior Advisor to the Fletcher Leadership Program for Financial Inclusion, an innovative dual-residency program for central bankers from emerging and frontier markets.
He is co-author (with Tonny Omwansa) of Money, Real Quick: Kenya’s Mobile-Money Innovation, about Safaricom’s M-PESA mobile-money service, and author of You Can Hear Me Now: How Microloans and Cell Phones Are Connecting the World’s Poor to the Global Economy, which focuses on entrepreneurship and innovation in developing countries. Papers include “Do BITs Really Work: Bilateral Investment Treaties and Their Grand Bargain” (with Fletcher’s Jeswald Salacuse), and “Cell Phones Provide Significant Economic Gains for Low-Income Americans.”
More recently, he has worked with the Financial Services Volunteer Corps and USAID as a “volunteer expert” and advisor to the Central Banks of Albania and Moldova, which are looking to move away from cash. He is also a writer for Oliver Wyman, a global consulting firm.
He was previously publisher of Innovations: Technology/Governance/Globalization (MIT Press), a founding partner of the Global Frontier Fund, a private equity fund-of-funds for frontier markets, and Executive Producer of Inc.com, a sister company to Inc. magazine.
Sullivan has been a Bellagio Fellow (Rockefeller Foundation), a Visiting Scholar at MIT’s Legatum Center for Development & Entrepreneurship, and a Visiting Fellow at Tufts’ Feinstein International Center. He is a recipient of grants from the John Templeton Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation. He is a graduate of Harvard College (AB) and The Fletcher School (MA).