Members
Elsa Marie D’Silva is the founder of Red Dot Foundation Global (Safecity), a platform that crowdsources personal experiences of sexual violence and abuse in public spaces. Since Safecity started in December 2012, it has become the largest crowd map on the issue in India, Kenya, Cameroon, Nigeria and Nepal.
She is an advisor to Women 7 (W7) under the German Presidency and part of the working group on Ending Gender based Violence. The W7 is a group of civil society organizations who come together to promote proposals on gender equality and women’s rights to governments within the Group of 7 (G7). At the same time, Elsa is a D&AD Awards Jury member for Impact (2021, 2022) and Future Impact (2021) and an Impact Council member.
Elsa is an alumna of the US State Department’s Fortune Program, Stanford CDDRL as well as the Swedish Institute Management Program. She is a fellow with Gratitude Network, International Women’s Forum, Yale World, Rotary Peace, Aspen New Voices , SE Forum, Vital Voices, Fast FWD Philadelphia, Chevening Gurukul at Oxford and a Reagan Fascell Democracy Fellow at NED. Moreover, Elsa is a BMW Responsible Leader, Bosch fellow and is listed as one of BBC Hindi’s 100 Women. She has won the Female Entrepreneur of the Year Award, the SheThePeople’s Digital Woman Award in Social Impact and the Vital Voices Global Leadership Award.
Prior to Safecity, she spent 20 years in the aviation industry, where she worked with Jet Airways and Kingfisher Airlines. In her last role in aviation, she was Vice President Network Planning.
Labs
Special function
GDL Communicators
Strategic Visionaries
Hosts
Topics
Sectors
Origin
Residence
Further Engagements
Elected Advisory Council
Every year, two GDL members of the Advisory Council are elected online by members. All four elected members of the Advisory Council (EAC) work on a pro bono basis.
Elsa is a member of the GDL Strategy Group and an EAC member since 2023.
She also engaged on the GDL communication strategy and worked on the member-driven social media channels.
She hosted the GDL Lab held online and in Mumbai, India in 2022 on Inclusive Cities, and the Youth Empowerment Lab 2023 in Osnabrück.
She was Editor of “The Demographic Dividend and the Power of Youth. Voices from the Global Diplomacy Lab” published in 2021.
Blog
Visions for Peaceful Futures with Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence is a common topic of discussion, whether you are looking at misinformation and disinformation or the use and risks of AI in international security or in education. But how about simply using this technology to explore a topic from a new point of view?
