Mohamed Shareef

Mohamed Shareef is a Maldivian digital government practitioner and researcher. For more than two decades he helped build the Maldives’ digital state, from the Government Network to the eFaas national digital identity.

He joined the National Centre for Information Technology in 2003 and rose from Systems Administrator to Chief Information Officer. From 2019 to 2021 he was Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Communication, Science and Technology, the senior-most civil servant. He then served as Minister of State for Environment, Climate Change and Technology until 2023. There he led the country’s digital public infrastructure and chaired the UN ESCAP Asia-Pacific Information Superhighway Steering Committee.

He is Head of PMO at Maldives Islamic Bank, where he leads governance of the bank’s digital transformation projects. He is also Senior Advisor, Digital Transformation, at Nexia Maldives, where he led the digital chapter of the National Development Plan 2025–2045.

His research examines digital sovereignty, AI governance and institutional accountability in small island states. His paper on the amplified sovereignty paradox took first place at ITU Kaleidoscope 2026. He is now doing doctoral research on AI governance in Islamic financial institutions. Earlier, he was a researcher at the Center for Electronic Governance at UNU-IIST in Macao and Vice Rector for Academic Development at Cyryx College.

He sits on the board of the UNU Global AI Network and is a Senior Member of IEEE. He holds an MEng in Electronic and Electrical Engineering with Management from the University of Birmingham.

Talks, papers and writing: mshareef.mv