Agenda

Nandini Chami is Deputy Director and Fellow – Research and Policy Engagement at IT for Change. She co-leads the organization’s work track on exploring feminist imaginaries of the governance of the digital economy. Nandini is also actively engaged in IT for Change’s global advocacy efforts at the intersections of techno-governance, human rights and development justice, particularly through the Global Digital Justice Forum.

Dr. Mehdi Snene is a Senior Advisor to the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Digital and Emerging Technologies and a member of the UN Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies, where he leads global initiatives in AI capacity-building, digital public infrastructure, and emerging tech. He previously directed the €1 billion Human Brain Project at EPFL, advancing neuromorphic computing and brain simulation, and served as Chief AI Officer at HealthAI, overseeing the strategic development and deployment of AI in healthcare. A former Associate Professor at the University of Geneva, he founded and led a research lab focused on AI, neuroscience, and high-performance computing.

David Souter is an independent writer and researcher on the digital society and its impact on economy and society, development, governance and the environment.  He has worked with many United Nations agencies, was lead author of the CSTD's twenty-year review of WSIS and advisor to DESA and the Co-Facilitators during the General Assembly WSIS+20 process last year.

Rob Floyd is Director of the Transformation Design Hub at the African Center for Economic Transformation (ACET). He oversees programming on digital and innovation policy, artificial intelligence, global financial architecture reform, the Future of Development Cooperation Coalition, African financial institutions, infrastructure and investment, G20, green industrialization and the hub’s incubator initiative.

Rob previously served as an ACET Director for Digital Policy and Innovations, and earlier as ACET’s Senior Advisor from July 2017 to July 2021. In that role, he supported ACET’s efforts to develop strategic partnerships, enhance its profile and deepen the ACET business model. 

An economist and journalist by training, Rob joined ACET from the World Bank. He began his World Bank career in the Africa Region, serving as an economist in the office of the Vice President, and then as public sector specialist for Southern and Eastern Africa. He was Chief of Staff to two World Bank Presidents, James Wolfensohn and Paul Wolfowitz, and later oversaw the Bank’s $2 billion annual lending programs to Pakistan and Bangladesh as Country Coordinator, including serving as interim Country Director in Bangladesh in 2009-2010. He was Director of Operations and Strategy for the World Bank Institute, where he launched the World Bank’s first innovation labs. His last position at the World Bank was Director for Operations and Strategy for Finance in the office of the World Bank Managing Director and CFO. 

Anriette Esterhuysen was the executive director of the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) - the largest ICT-focused civil society network in the world - from 2000 to 2017. She continues to work with APC as a consultant and convenes the African School on Internet Governance (AfriSIG), a joint initiative of APC, the African Union Commission and Research ICT Africa. She is an active member of the Global Digital Justice Forum, a coalition of civil society voices from the global South.

She has served as Chair of the Multistakeholder Advisory Committee of the United Nations Internet Governance Forum, a member of the United Nations ICT Task Force (2002-2005), the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Working Group on Financing Mechanisms (2003-2005), the Commission on Science and Technology for Development Working Group on Internet Governance Forum (IGF) Improvements (2011-2012) and on Enhanced Cooperation (2017-2018), the Global Commission on Internet Governance and the Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace. She is currently a member of the advisory board of the Digital Empowerment Foundation and the board of directors of TENET, South Africa’ Research and Education Network. Anriette was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame as a Global Connecter in 2013 and received an EFF Pioneer Award in 2015. 

Céliane Pochon is a Senior Policy Advisor at the Swiss Federal Office of Communications (OFCOM), where she works on some of the most pressing governance questions of our digital age, from internet governance and AI policy to data governance. She brings a collaborative and solutions-oriented approach to multilateral processes, believing that inclusive and well-designed governance structures are key to ensuring digital technologies benefit everyone. 

Deniz Susar is a Governance and Public Administration Officer, Digital Government Branch, Division for Public Institutions and Digital Government is a Governance and Public Administration Officer at the Division for Public Institutions and Digital Government of UNDESA. Deniz’s main work areas include digital government and preparation of the biannual UNDESA flagship publication ‘United Nations E-Government Survey'. As part of his current role, he also supports the Internet Governance Forum (IGF). HIs main research areas include e-government, open government, citizen engagement, internet governance, artificial intelligence and other frontier technologies and open government data. Deniz holds a Master Degree on International Political Economy and Development from Fordham University, New York, United States and a Computer Engineering degree from the Bosphorus University of Istanbul, Turkey. 

Lauren Bieniek currently serves as a Program Officer focused on Development Finance at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), where she supports Giga, a joint ITU-UNICEF initiative aimed at connecting every school to the Internet by 2030. In this role, Lauren supports global advocacy, research, and project support for digital infrastructure investments that can drive last mile connectivity in hard-to-reach communities.

Prior to ITU, Lauren spent nearly a decade at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) supporting grant portfolios to advance innovation and digital programming in partner countries. Most recently, Lauren’s work focused on structuring blended finance support for internet infrastructure companies, primarily in Africa.

With a focus on leveraging market-driven approaches to international development, Lauren has worked in corporate social responsibility, public-private partnerships, and advancing cross-sector collaboration to enable social impact. Lauren holds degrees from the Pennsylvania State University and Tufts University in the United States and completed a Boren Fellowship for Graduate Students in Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Carlos Rey-Moreno, after working in providing connectivity to remote health care centres in Latin America, has devoted the last eight years to studying, developing and supporting community networks around the world. As part of his PhD he co-founded Zenzeleni Networks, and studied the main drivers that could make a community network in rural South Africa sustainable and scalable. After obtaining his doctorate in 2015, he went and studied the common denominators across community networks in Africa, producing a seminal report on the topic, and co-organised the first five editions of the Summit on Community Networks in Africa. For the last four years, he has been with the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), where he co-leads its community networks initiative, overseeing projects in Latin America, Africa and Asia. He also coordinates its policy and regulatory work to create a more enabling regulatory framework for local operators and community networks. As part of that, he has provided training to regional regulatory associations and policy makers in Africa, authored reports and written submissions to public consultations on the topic, and participated frequently as speaker and convener in internet governance and similar telecommunications policy forums.