Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi, a 35-year-old engineer, could be Iran’s youngest cabinet member as the ICT Minister in Rouhani’s new government. 

A new cabinet was introduced by President Hassan Rouhani and the youngest cabinet member is a 35-year-old engineer who was the ICT Deputy Minister, Chairman of the Board & Managing Director at Iran’s Telecommunications Infrastructure Company (TIC). Before Jahromi gets on the cabinet member list of Rouhani, there were many rumors regarding the next ICT Minister and many names have been surfaced on the news. However, at the end, Jahromi was introduced as the suggested ICT Minister by Rouhani and if the parliament approves Jahromi, Iran would have its very own youngest Minister of its history after the Iranian revolution. 

What do we know about Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi?

Jahromi is a 35-year-old Electrical engineer. He has been the ICT Deputy Minister, Chairman of the Board & Managing Director at Iran’s Telecommunications Infrastructure Company (TIC) from early 2016. Before that, he was serving the country as a member of the board at TIC for almost two years from 2014 to 2016.

He also had a position as a Non-Executive Member of the Board at Rightel —the third mobile network operator in the country— from 2014 to 2016. And roughly from 2009 to 2014 he served as General Manager of Communications Systems Security at the Communication Regulatory Authority Of The I.R. Iran or simply CRA.

These are basically the most important positions that Jahromi has filled in his professional career. Plus, Jahromi had at least 12 other positions in ICT sector in the government.

What makes Jahromi so interesting to us is the effort which he has put in the past year for faster, cheaper and more widespread internet. He is one of the eager supporters of free access to information and the internet. Before Rouhani’s government, the main strategy for regulating the cyber space was censorship or filtering.

However, now this strategy is moving slowly toward building the culture in cyber space for better use. Jahromi is a strong supporter of this strategy to the point that he recently supported the unbanning of YouTube and Blogger in the universities of Iran. Supporting startups is also one of the priorities of Jahromi’s plan which could be a good sign to Iranian youth. 

With the official support of current ICT Minister, Mahmoud Vaezi, Jahromi has a high chance of becoming the next ICT Minister of Iran.