Muhammad Meki

Muhammad Meki is Visiting Associate Professor of Economics at Georgetown University in Qatar in Fall, 2025.  He is Associate Professor with the Oxford Department of International Development and Associate Member of the Department of Economics at Oxford University.  Professor Meki is a development economist whose research focuses on microfinance. He is interested in the effect of equity-like financial contracts–involving, for example, shared ownership of fixed assets, sharing of revenue streams, or profit sharing–on the investment and growth of small firms. Equity-based products also have the potential to serve a large number of poor Muslim entrepreneurs across the world, who are often excluded from conventional microfinance products due to the classical religious prohibition on usury. Muhammad has conducted fieldwork in Pakistan, Kenya and Bangladesh. Prior to academia, Muhammad worked for five years as a trader in the financial markets, for Bank of America in London and Deutsche Bank in Singapore, where he traded European and Asian government bonds, foreign exchange derivatives and other fixed-income products. Meki completed his DPhil in 2018 at the University of Oxford (St. John’s College). He was a Junior Research Fellow at Pembroke College. Muhammad has also previously completed postgraduate degrees in finance (MSc, LSE), economics (PGDip, Cambridge), and development economics (MSc, Oxford).