The Legatum Center empowers the MIT community to accelerate social and economic progress across the developing world through innovation-driven entrepreneurship.
Programs & Opportunities
- Fellowships: The Legatum Center offers Fellowships for incoming and current MIT students who have demonstrated a commitment to impact in the developing world through their entrepreneurial ventures. The Legatum Fellowship is a selective, year-long leadership program that provides personalized programming, networking and mentorship, entrepreneurial skills and knowledge development, and financial support (including tuition support, stipend and seed grants) to launch and scale ideas.
- Grants: For MIT students exploring a venture idea in a developing economy, the Legatum Center offers Seed Grants. Students can use these grants to travel to the field, immersing themselves in their local market and experiencing innovation-driven entrepreneurship opportunities first-hand.
- Conferences: The Legatum Center hosts an annual series of events in collaboration with key partners across campus to foster MIT’s entrepreneurship and development community. The annual conference, Scaling Development Ventures, and the monthly speaker series, not only celebrate student and alumni entrepreneurs, but also help promote and shape discourse on bottom-up development and systems change through innovation-driven entrepreneurship.
- Research-Driven Innovation: The Legatum Center connects students to faculty and researchers across campus doing high-impact research at the intersection of development and entrepreneurship. Starting in fall 2016, the center started offering Research Assistantships for students seeking to understand and develop programmatic and policy interventions that promote systems change in the developing world through innovation-driven entrepreneurship. The Legatum Center also writes case studies as education tools for students and educators.
- Zambezi Prize: Targeting financial inclusion entrepreneurs in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Zambezi Prize offers finalists $200,000 per year in cash prizes and an opportunity to participate in an annual boot camp run by MIT. The Prize raises awareness of entrepreneurship and financial inclusion, encourages the flow of capital to financial inclusion ventures, and advances entrepreneurship and financial inclusion to fuel broad-based prosperity. It also creates meaningful pathways between the MIT community and the growing financial inclusion entrepreneurship community in Sub-Saharan Africa to engage, collaborate, and share knowledge.
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