Raheel Khursheed

Until July 2018, Raheel executed a variety of senior executive roles at Twitter in India and SouthEast Asia. As one of the first employees of Twitter in this region, he led the conception, development, and roll-out of multiple awardwinning civic tech products — Twitter Seva/Kemala, SmartFeed - that democratized information, helped governments across the region do their jobs with accountability and transparency, and enabled meaningful citizen engagement at scale across the region. Raheel’s innovative product and partnerships work — from Twitter SMS alerts to live data on national television — dramatically altered how elections and politics are narrated in South and SouthEast Asia.

Raheel previously served as the founding director of communications and strategy for India at Change.org, the world’s leading petition platform, executing an effective strategy that successfully seeded petitioning as an organizing tool across the sub-continent resulting in many groundbreaking changes in legislation and infrastructure.

A cross-platform storyteller by training, Raheel has worked in, written, produced, field produced, and broken stories for outlets globally such as Vice, PBS, ProPublica, BBC-PRI, and a host of publications across the world. For Mercy Corps International, Raheel executed a highly successful Participatory Planning Youth Leadership Project in Kashmir, where more than 1000 Kashmiri youth, political, business and law enforcement leaders received leadership and negotiation training from experts from Tufts and Harvard.

Raheel is a globally recognized technology impact leader and for his groundbreaking work of democratizing information at scale was named a 2017 Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard, a member of the 2017 class of Asia 21 — Asia-Pacific’s foremost network of young leaders — and a 2018 Draper-Hills Summer Fellow at the Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University.

He is passionate about the intersection of technology and social change and is a frequent speaker on these issues across conferences and media outlets globally.