As Salesforce.org’s Director of Humanitarian Impact Data, Rakesh Bharania is responsible for defining engagement with the humanitarian community, focusing on the principled, safe and ethical application of innovative technologies to accelerate humanitarian and development impact. He has spent more than 27 years in the humanitarian sector, focusing on the intersection of emerging technologies and international humanitarian crisis response and development. He is currently working as a strategist for the Salesforce.org response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Some of Rakesh’s past work includes responding to the September 11, 2001 attacks and Hurricane Katrina in the United States, the earthquakes in Haiti and Japan, Super Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, the Ebola response in West Africa, and the Syrian refugee crisis in Europe. Prior to Salesforce.org, he worked on the privacy engineering team at Apple, focused on EU GDPR compliance and related policy and engineering work, and at Cisco where he helped to create one of the earliest private sector humanitarian technology response teams.