One of the very real privileges of being Secretary General of the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation is the opportunity that it has given me to visit so many different countries and people across the Commonwealth. It is so important that we celebrate our cultural differences and richness, rather than trying to create a single uniform market across the world! The CTO’s Annual Forum is always an occasion when our host countries share something of their culture, usually in the form of dance and music. Last night was a very special occasion. Grameenphone, which started with the Village Phone programme to empower the rural women of Bangladesh in 1997, became the first operator to cover 99% of the country’s people with network, and is now the leading and largest telecommunications service provider in Bangladesh with more than 48.68 million subscribers as of March 2014. It was such an honour to meet with Vivek Sood, CEO of Grameen phone and his staff, and I hope that the imagery below captures something of the excitement, beauty and energy of this wonderful evening. Thank you so much to all of the dancers and musicians who shared so much of their culture with us.
Tim Unwin's Blog 
Tim,
Follow the money…
Grameen Phone is majority owned (56%) by Telenor, which in turn is 54% owned by the State of Norway. Telenor has with the help of the Bangladesh users created one of the largest telecom operators in the world, with 49 million subscribers. It is also a very profitable company. Should Norway decide to sell this asset, they can expect a market capitalization value of about $100 per subscriber or more. The Government’s of Norway share would be 30% of that, or about 1.5 billion USD. According to Norad’s excellent web site http://www.norad.no this would be about twice the total of Norway’s assistance to Bangladesh in the period 1990 to 2013.