Shamira Ahmed

Shamira Ahmed is a policy leader fellow at the European University Institute's Florence School of Transnational Governance, where her research focuses on human-centered sustainable digital transformation, frontier technologies and structural change, ethical innovation, responsible artificial intelligence (AI) governance, and intersectional inequalities. As executive director of the Data Economy Policy Hub (DepHUB), the first independent think tank founded by an indigenous African woman in South Africa (SA), and founder of the Artificial Intelligence for Circularity Exchange (AI4CE), Shamira is a pioneering figure in advancing transnational policy discourse on sustainable digital transformation in SA.

Shamira's participation as a founding partner of the South African AI Association (SAAIA) and global chair of the Digital for Development (D4D) Hub Civil Society & Academia Advisory Group (CSAAG) stands as a testament to her commitment to advancing inclusive transnational policy discourse in the digital age and addressing pressing global challenges through interdisciplinary approaches. With a background as a policy entrepreneur and quantitative economist, she has led numerous multinational policy-oriented research projects and contributed significantly to publications such as the African Union Commission's "Data Policy Framework" and the Global Partnership on AI's Report "Towards Real Diversity and Gender Equality in Artificial Intelligence", to name a few.