Sheetal Kumar

Sheetal Kumar is a freelance consultant and expert in digital rights advocacy, with extensive experience in research, capacity building, and strategy development across digital technology policy, internet governance, gender, and human rights.

She has a longstanding association with Global Partners Digital (GPD), where she previously served as Head of Global Engagement, providing strategic direction for GPD’s global engagement and advocacy portfolio. In this role, she coordinated engagement in regional and global policy forums, including UN processes such as the Internet Governance Forum, the UN Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies, and the Human Rights Council. As a freelance consultant, she continues to support GPD’s work on technical standard-setting and internet fragmentation, including by facilitating the UN IGF Policy Network on Internet Fragmentation since 2022 and supporting strategic guidance and capacity-building for civil society engagement in standards bodies.

Beyond GPD, she has recently worked with the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Democracy Reporting International, the CyberPeace Institute, and the Association for Progressive Communications to advance inclusive and human-rights-respecting approaches to digital technology policy. She is the author of several recent publications on human rights in digital contexts.