Mr. Ahmad Iqbal is a public policy and finance practitioner with experience in the private sector, development sector, and most recently as elected head of the local government in District Narowal. In 2017, he was elected as Chairman of District Council Narowal, principal local government serving over 1.7 million population of District Narowal in Punjab. As Chairman District Council, he was Co-Convener of the Local Government Reform & Empowerment Committee that was responsible for implementation of the newly instituted Punjab Local Government Act, 2013. Ahmad was also a member of the technical committee of the Punjab Finance Commission (PFC) that devised the intergovernmental fiscal transfer formula for the local governments in Punjab. Furthermore, he was part of the team that designed and executed the first ever rural waste management and sanitation program catering to over 70 million rural population of Punjab. As Chairman District Council, he successfully initiated several district wide community engagement programs in the areas of public health, sports, and climate change.
Ahmad has worked as a consultant with the World Bank on urban competitiveness, urban transport and climate finance. He was responsible for financial due diligence, transaction structuring and determination of carbon pricing for carbon finance investments in clean and/or energy efficiency projects in least developed countries of Africa for the World Bank’s Carbon Initiative for Development (CIDev). In urban transport, he oversaw design, implementation and procurement for Urban Transport Master Plan and Public Transport Restructuring Study for Chittagong, Bangladesh and developed case studies on Traffic Congestion in Cairo (Egypt) and Urban Transport Planning in New Delhi (India) in collaboration with Professor José A. Gómez-Ibáñez (Harvard University), as part of a major capacity-building initiative for senior policymakers in developing countries. Ahmad was lead author and researcher on a major Climate Finance research initiative with the World Resources Institute (WRI) on tracking capital investment flows in transport infrastructure and comparing global transport infrastructure investment needs in a low carbon scenario.
From 2007 – 2012, he was affiliated with KASB-BofA Merrill Lynch Investment Banking Pakistan & Aequitas Pakistan, where he worked on transactions worth over US$1.5 billion cumulatively in financial services, IT, agribusiness, education, and infrastructure, including privatization, restructuring, M&A, GDR listings (London, UK), IPOs, & private equity. Ahmad holds a Bachelor of Science with Honors in Economics from the Lahore School of Economics (Pakistan) and Master of Public Administration from Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania (USA).