Neema Iyer

Neema Iyer (born ), is a technologist and artist. She is the founder and the former executive director of Pollicy, a civic technology organization based in Kampala, Uganda.

Early life and education Iyer was raised in Nigeria by parents who are Tanzanian and Indian. She then attended Emory University and completed a Masters in Public Health with a focus on epidemiology and statistics before returning to Africa.

Career After Iyer moved to Uganda in 2013, she worked in information and communications technology, and then founded the civic technology organization Pollicy.

Pollicy and Iyer have conducted research, including about gender-based violence in Africa, and online safety for women, with reports illustrated by Iyer. This includes the "Alternate Realities, Alternate Identities" study, in which the team spoke to 3,000 women across Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, South Africa, and Senegal to understand their experiences in online spaces and how technology platforms and legal systems respond to them. Pollicy also conducted the "Afrofeminist Data Futures" study, exploring feminist movements and digital connectivity across Africa. Iyer has also worked on multiple civic projects through Pollicy, including "Create Your Kampala", which worked with artists who create murals around the city as a springboard to engage local leaders on service delivery. In addition, her efforts in Pollicy push to highlight anti-human trafficking technology and efforts to engage women in politics. which her team spent months developing. Iyer drew the characters for the game, and emphasized in her designs the target audience of Africans. and a "Digital safe-tea" game designed with a "choose your own adventure" format to promote online safety awareness for women in Africa.

In July 2021, Iyer was appointed to the Global Women's Safety Advisory Board at Facebook. ]during which she authored "Automated Imperialism, Expansionist Dreams: Exploring Digital Extractivism in Africa," examining nine forms of digital extractivism and their parallels to colonial practices on the continent.As a PACS fellow, she studied digital extractivism, which she defines as "a form of extraction that’s made possible by digitization and exacerbated through borderless capitalism."

In 2023, Iyer stepped down from her role as the executive director of Pollicy, and continues as an advisor and board member.

Honors and awards 2021 Quartz Africa Innovator 2021 Digital Equality Award, Research and Knowledge Builder category, Coalition for Digital Equality (CODE) 2021–2022 Digital Civil Society Lab (DCSL) Practitioner Fellow, Stanford University