Monica Ioannidou Polemitis

Monica holds a BA (Honours) in Economics and Politicics awarded from the University of Essex, UK and an MSc in International and European Politics awarded from the University of Edinburgh in the UK. She is actively involved in building the startup ecosystem and is also heavily involved in various research projects related to a broad range of areas such as open data, ICT, environment, renewable energy sources and education.

Monica is a Senior Manager at Deloitte Cyprus Innovation and Entrepreneurship Centre. As such, her work focuses on the two pillars suggested by the Centre’s name. Under the Innovation pillar, she is responsible for promoting Deloitte’s participation in projects which focus on and promote innovative practices in various sectors of the economy, such as research projects in cooperation with leading universities and research institutions throughout Europe. Under the Entrepreneurship pillar, Monica is responsible for IECs activities and initiatives related to startups, with a vision to develop the entrepreneurship ecosystem of Cyprus.

In 2015, she co-founded Makewaves Cyprus, which is a non-profit company aiming to strengthen democracy, increase accountability and transparency in the political scene in Cyprus and at the same time encourage citizens and especially young people to become more involved in the decision making structures. Makewaves has created vouliwatch Cyprus (vouli=parliament) which is an electronic platform that enables citizens to better understand the work carried out in the parliament and at the same time allows them to get in direct contact with Members of Parliament.

Monica is a leading expert in Cyprus in relation to open government data and was also a key expert and co-author of the study detailing the results of the research conducted for the assessment of civil society in Cyprus using the CIVICUS methodology.