About
Proxara Policy was founded on the simple observation that the people best placed to advise on technology policy are rarely the ones sitting only inside government, or only inside a platform. The most useful perspective sits at the point where both sides have to actually work together, and in this region, very few advisors have genuinely occupied both.
Mwenda Kilemi
Founder & Principal, Proxara Policy
Mwenda Kilemi founded Proxara Policy after leaving TikTok, where he served as Head of EMEA Product Policy, working across more than fifty markets on content policy, platform safety, and government engagement. Before that, he was Senior Policy Advisor for Responsible AI and Language Policy at Google in Dublin, and he has advised Kenya’s Office of the President on technology matters. He lectures at the University of Nairobi and is a founding board member of Village Trust, an NGO in Meru County supporting women, youth, and people with disabilities. That grassroots work keeps him grounded in how technology and policy decisions actually land on the person using the product or waiting on the service, not just on the institutions writing the rules.
That combination of platform-side experience at two of the world’s largest technology companies and direct engagement with government policymaking is genuinely rare in this region, where most advisors have built a career on one side of the table or the other, not both.
A view shaped by living across continents
Mwenda’s career has taken him from Nairobi to Dublin to New York and beyond, holding degrees from Columbia University and Purdue University in the United States, working across TikTok’s EMEA markets, and advising government in Kenya. That path has given him a practical feel for how culture shapes both the personal and professional side of getting things done, whether that is how a relationship is built before a deal is discussed, how hierarchy and consensus operate differently across a government ministry and a technology company, or how the same policy question lands differently in Nairobi, Brussels, or Washington. Advising well across borders requires understanding this interplay, not just the regulatory text.
That range, from a mature platform to a fast-growing one, from government corridors to boardrooms, is also what shapes how Proxara Policy sees the wider relationship between government and technology: less a story of restriction, and more one of opportunities to build stronger, more productive systems together. More on that on the What We Do and Who We Work With pages.
How we work
Every engagement is led personally, with judgment built from having actually made these decisions from inside a platform and inside government, not just studied them from outside. We work with governments, technology companies, and multilateral institutions across Africa, Europe, and beyond, and we bring the same rigour to a Nairobi county briefing as we would to a multilateral working group in Geneva.
If you are navigating a technology policy question that needs someone who has actually sat where you are sitting, get in touch.