Ian Makamara

Ian Makamara is a 24-year-old Kenyan lawyer with an interest in digital rights and gender equality. Ian possesses a Bachelor of Laws degree from Strathmore University, a Certification in Gender Analytics from the University of Toronto and a Certificate in Human Rights from the Hague Academy. Outside of his professional interests, he is also a huge fan of basketball and football, poetry and romantic literature.

Currently, Ian is a Public Policy and Corporate Communication Conslutant with Speyside where he has advised multiple tech companies such as Tiktok with a special focus on the Kenyan market. He is also working as an Advisory Board Member for the Global Childhood Academy, where he provides strategic advisory on the organisation’s marketing and partnership strategy. He is also serves as a representative and advisor on multiple youth centred organisations. One of said organisations is the ITU’s Generation Connect Africa Team, which has allowed him to progress in his work on tech policy and digital inclusion. Ian is also a member of the CIVICUS Youth Action Team, which is a group that works for the youth to be represented in all of the alliance’s governance, strategies, and activities. He has contributed to the planning of various activities that will connect youth activists to each other and provide holistic training and instruction that will see youth activists globally enhance the impact of their activities.

Prior to that, he worked as a Digital Rights Officer at the Lawyers Hub, an institution that works on justice innovation and tech policy in Africa. In this role, some of his achievements include playing a key role in the execution of a series of events that have significantly impacted the tech policy landscape in Africa. These include the inaugural Africa Law Tech Festival in 2020, Legal Innovation Week and the 2nd ALTF. He also coordinated the research in a joint project done with Data4Change and Foxglove Legal on the mapping out of COVID-19 Laws enacted in Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda and the various impacts that they had on human rights in the selected countries.

Before that, Ian worked with the World Future Council as a research assistant and played a key role in the research and administration leading up to the best policy award of 2019. This is an award instituted by WFC, IPU and UNDP and his research on policies such as Ethiopia's Land Redistribution Policy and South Africa's Tax Income Incentive were instrumental in the selection of the award.

On matters concerning youth empowerment and involvement, his work began in 2018, where as part of the UN-SDSN Youth Great Lakes team, he worked on a series of initiatives to empower the youth in his community. The most notable of these projects included the establishment of the Bridge Mentorship Program. This was a program that catered to the counseling and academic mentorship for 80 underprivileged girls in the Kibera slums in Kenya.