Michael Fairbanks is Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Akagera Medicines, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company located in Kigali, Boston, and San Francisco. It is majority-owned by the Rwanda Social Security Board. He was a Peace Corps teacher in Kenya. He has been a Fellow of the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is the author of Plowing the Sea: Nurturing the Hidden Sources of Growth in the Developing World (Harvard Business School Press, 1997), with a foreword by Michael E. Porter, and of In the River They Swim: Essays from Around the World on Enterprise Solutions to Poverty (Templeton Press, 2009), and an editor/author of Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress (Basic Books, 2000), edited by Sam Huntington and Larry Harrison. He advised a number of heads of state and government in the Andes, Caribbean, Africa, and Eastern Europe and the presidents of the Inter-American Development Bank on Opportunities for the Majority, the African Development Bank on China in Africa, and the World Bank Comprehensive Development Program.
Michael is a citizen of the United States, Ireland, and Rwanda.