Omar Mansoor Ansari is Afghanistan’s senior entrepreneur and researcher in ICT. He has over fifteen years of experience in building institutions, coalition and technology startups. Omar worked with Microsoft and IDRC, between 2004 and 2008, on software localization and received Microsoft Localization Champion Award. He worked as the Co-founder/ Executive director of Afghan Computer Science Association (ACSA), 1999-2008, and Editor-in-Chief of the Computer Science bimonthly.

Omar was recently appointed as a member of the IGF- Internet Governance Forum’s Multistakeholder Advisory Group (MAG). He served as Kabul director of the Founder Institute, an idea stage accelerator headquartered in Silicon Valley. Omar worked in youth employment, technology, entrepreneurship, public policy, strategic planning, campaigning and PR. His most recent work includes founding TechWomen Afghanistan, a network of Afghan women in tech; TechDera, a community technology center based in Kabul; and TechAfghanistan, a technology information and resource portal, Managing Ibtikaar, a technology business incubator by MCIT– all platforms for technology development and promotion, business acceleration, education and networking. He served as coordinator of IGF Afghanistan 2017 that brought together around 200 key actors to discuss Internet Governance issues.

Omar is a full time President of TechNation, a Kabul based technology and management consulting company, Chairman of the National ICT Alliance of Afghanistan (NICTAA), the country’s largest consortium of ICT players, Vice Chairman of the Internet Society of Afghanistan, and is elected Board Member of the World IT and Services Alliance (WITSA) and member of ICANN’s Business Constituency. Omar has been advising the Government of Afghanistan, Ministry of Communications and IT, Ministry of Trade and Commerce, USAID and The World Bank projects and programs on various ICT4D issues.