Digital Action – Campaigns and Partnerships Manager – Middle East & Northern Africa

Campaigns and Partnerships Manager – Middle East & Northern Africa December 2022

Digital Action is at an exciting stage of development having emerged from our start up phase strong, experienced and well placed within our field. After 4 years of experimenting and learning we can now be bold in our leadership within the sector.

We are co-creating a global, multi-year, collaborative campaign which would lead to:

Major ad tech companies – Facebook (Meta), Twitter and Google/YouTube –being compelled to establish effective and equitable safeguards against the risks their products and policies pose in the context of elections across the world by 2024, the biggest and most significant year for elections globally this century.

About Digital Action

Digital Action was launched in 2019 with a mission to strengthen democratic rights in a digital age. We run campaigns aimed at improving the accountability of global social media giants, and at strengthening protections from online harms. We apply a human rights framework to our work, and prioritise areas where online harms lead to real world marginalisation and violence, and where they have outsized impact on already marginalised groups.

We work in a unique way for this sector, focusing on collective action. This means that everything we do is in collaboration with partners and building coalitions that deliver higher impacts than organisations can achieve individually. We do not seek brand profile for ourselves, and much of what we do happens in the background, but you can see some of our recent campaigns on our website.

In recent years it has become ever clearer that there is a global equity crisis at the centre of tech accountability. Ad tech companies headquartered in the global north - and the regulators responsible for them - have been negligent when it comes to dealing with the impact of tech on the global majority. Corporate leaks and on-the-ground civil society experience suggest that companies are barely investing in harm assessment and mitigation outside the US and English language content. Yet as the companies’ influence on information ecosystems in Africa, Asia and Latin America grows, their impacts are becoming more serious, more extensive, and more frequent.

In 2024, the ‘Year of Democracy’, more than 2 billion people will be entitled to vote as US Presidential and European Parliamentary elections converge with national polls in India, South Africa, Mexico and some 50 other countries. When it comes to the widespread use and impact of social media, 2024 will be the make-or-break year for democracy globally and a test for ad tech companies’ readiness to support elections. Digital Action views this global electoral moment as a critical focal point for the connection between ad tech design, democratic rights, and the prevention of violence. There will be efforts at national level to advocate for more company investment, and to detect and tell stories of harms. We believe that to add value to this work and ensure it reaches the centres of corporate and political power, there is a need for global coordination, knowledge-sharing and collective action. We are developing global campaigning and programmes of work around this challenge, which will associate civil society organisations and stakeholders from across the world, notably the MENA region.

We are supported in part by grants from: the Open Society Foundations, Luminate, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Ford Foundation. Digital Action is a project of New Venture Fund, a US based 501(c)(3) public charity that incubates new and innovative public-interest projects and grant-making programs. New Venture Fund is the legal entity that contracts and manages our revenue and expenditure and with whom this post holder would have a contract.

> Role Purpose: To lead our collaborative, coalitiondriven campaigning and partnership work for the MENA region to deliver high impact global campaigns on tech, democracy and human rights.

> Place of work: Digital Action is a remote-first organisation, and all team members work from their homes (with necessary equipment provided) or an agreed co-working space. Although this role could be based anywhere, we would need the post holder to live within a time difference of +/- 3 hours from GMT. The successful candidate will be working with a global team who work remotely and are currently spread across London, Dublin and Beirut.

> Travel: The post holder would need to commit to planned international travel for at least one week every couple of months. This will involve trips to London several times a year and travel to international events.

> Reporting: This role will report to the Head of Campaigns.

> Principal Relationships: All staff, contractors, campaign partners and stakeholders.

> Remuneration: Digital Action believes in inclusive transparent recruitment and ordinarily we practise displaying salaries in all of our recruitment. However, as we don’t know the location of this role it has not been possible to decide on a fixed salary as it depends on the local labour market and whether the post holder takes the position as a self-employed contractor or as an employee. This role will be offered initially as a 2-year fixed-term contract, which we expect to extend after that period.

> Digital Action values diversity, inclusion and equity: we are committed to diversity, equity and inclusion in our staff team, partnerships and operations. We believe that recruiting the best talent to deliver our mission depends on inclusive working environments and the diversity of our team. We deeply value a broad range of talents, irrespective of age, disability (including hidden disabilities), gender, gender identity or gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, or sexual orientation.

> We want to further increase the diversity of our team and particularly welcome applications from people from historically and systemically marginalised groups. We have developed a pro-equity plan and are constantly striving to learn and improve in this regard so if you have questions or feedback, we would be happy to hear from you.

> Flexible working: Digital Action is committed to the wellbeing of everyone we work with, and we encourage our colleagues to balance their work with other things that are important to them and as such we are committed to making flexible work available to all of our team. This role is offered in the range of 30 - 37.5 hours per week (0.8-1 FTE).

We are recruiting a talented team of global campaigners to support this ambition, you can view the organogram of the campaigns team we expect to build in 2023 on the next page.

Campaigns Team

Head of Campaigns

Global Campaigns Manager

Senior Campaigns & Partnerships Manager (MENA or SSA)

Stakeholder & Media Engagement Adviser (US)

Campaigns & Partnerships Manager (MENA or SSA) Campaigns Officer

About The Role

Job Description:

The Campaigns and Partnerships Manager for MENA will be a critical role within Digital Action’s global campaigns team to ensure our global campaigns are informed by tech, democracy and human rights challenges in MENA, as well as to ensure civil society groups and communities affected by online harms in MENA are fully associated and benefit from this work.

The Campaigns and Partnerships Manager’s responsibilities include:

Campaigning

> Contributing to the development and delivery of high impact, collaborative and creative global campaigns on tech accountability.

> Leading the delivery of campaigning with organisations and activists in the MENA region.

> Providing knowledge and strategic insights on MENA tech, democracy and human rights issues and communities.

> Contributing to design of campaigns strategies that can deliver benefits for MENA civil society groups and communities affected by online harms.

External Relations and Partnerships

> Leading partnership building and programmes of work within MENA.

> Building and maintaining relationships with a diverse range of collaborators, including civil society and grassroots organisations and networks, think tanks, journalists, and technologists.

> Producing campaigns research and communications outputs to a high professional standard (including reports, briefings, social media comms).

> Building relationships with campaign stakeholders for the achievement of campaign goals, such as experts, policymakers and institutional or quasiinstitutional actors like election monitors.

Other

> Collaborating and coordinating actively and effectively with the global campaigns team.

> Engaging actively in monitoring, learning and evaluation of programmes of work, and donor reporting of activities.

> Effectively using shared knowledge, relationship management and collaborative work tools, including Slack, Salesforce and shared filing systems.

> Contributing to organisational strategic planning encompassing campaigns and operations.

> Managing consultants, contractors or junior staff to deliver projects.

> Supporting in the running of a growing, fastmoving organisation. As a new organisation, everyone is expected to pitch in with a range of tasks that will change over time, including contributing to fundraising reports and meetings, maintaining contact databases and developing and maintaining new frameworks to monitor and evaluate our work.

Person Specification

Below are the skills, experience and knowledge we’re looking for. Please consider this as a menu, not a list of requirements: we do NOT expect any one candidate to have ALL of these covered. What we will be looking for as we evaluate applications is demonstrable experience in at least some of these, and evidence of capacity to build skills in other areas. So, if you see yourself in some of these descriptions, then we encourage you to apply.

Experience and Skills

> You understand corporate accountability campaigning, and the range of strategies in the corporate accountability field to bridge the divide between northern centres of corporate power and southern centres of harm associated with corporate operations.

> You take a global perspective when it comes to your analysis and understanding of online harms, and have an understanding of the issues at play in the MENA region.

> You are highly skilled at building relationships, networks and partnerships, with experience working within or with MENA groups.

> You have experience engaging in or running civil society coalitions.

> You are a succinct and clear communicator, able to understand what an audience needs, and deliver information in as efficient a way as possible.

> You have experience of organising and facilitating in-person and virtual convenings with partners and stakeholders.

> You understand how change happens in holding governments and companies to account – including formal and informal levers of influence. And you have demonstrable experience developing strategies and creative tactics to pull these levers and learn from the process and results.

> You are a skilled project manager.

> You are used to working and writing in English to a professional standard, and are proficient in Arabic.

> You have experience managing junior staff or interns, and consultants or contractors to deliver projects.

> You have at least seven years’ relevant experience.

Knowledge

> You understand the debates and dilemmas around tech policy and democracy and you are open-minded about the best way to resolve these dilemmas to strengthen democracy.

> You already have a broad range of connections with potential collaborators, journalists, and/ or engaged community groups in MENA.

> You are knowledgeable about the key players in our field: you can identify the thought leaders on platform accountability, online harms etc. and understand their perspectives in the context of the debates in this area of work.

Personal Qualities

> You are driven by purpose, you recognise the power and privilege of working for social justice and democracy, and strive for the most impact, comfortable with running with ideas that come from other people and allowing others to get the public credit.

> You are a team player and you are self-sufficient, you take the initiative and can manage and prioritise your work autonomously to achieve objectives.

> You are comfortable performing the full range of tasks necessary in a small organisation.

How to Apply

All correspondence, at this stage, should be via Oxford HR. To apply for this post, click on the “Apply” button on the job advert page, complete our online application form, and submit your CV and cover letter. Please provide a CV and cover letter in two different documents, which should be prepared before applying as they will be considered in the application process. The cover letter should be no more than two pages long and explain why you are interested in this post and how your skills and experience make you a suitable candidate for this position.

The document should be saved in PDF in the following format: Your First Name-Your Last Name-Document Name-Date (mmyy) e.g., Pat-JonesCV-122022-DigitalAction or Pat-JonesCoverLetter-122022- DigitalAction.

Timeline

Closing Date: 26th January 2023

Oxford HR Interviews: w/c 6 February 2023 and w/c 13 February 2023

Final Interviews with Digital Action: TBC

Selection Process

All candidates will receive an update regarding their application after the closing date. We advise candidates to add the role email to their safe senders list and regularly check their spam folder.

Equality Statement

Equality and diversity are at the core of Digital Action’s values. Staff are expected to work collectively and individually to promote a constructive and sensitive approach to others from a variety of backgrounds, where the work of others is valued and respected.

Queries

If you have any queries on any aspect of the appointment process, need additional information, or would like to have an informal discussion, please email at digitalaction-mena@oxfordhr. com in the first instance.

Digital Action

About Oxford HR

Oxford HR operates globally - mainly within the international development and charity sectors. We carry out retained executive search mandates at board and senior management levels. We also offer human resource and organisational development consultancy.

Oxford HR has many years of experience in search as well as an extensive network of international development, social sector, corporate, public sector, and academic contacts from across the world. We carry out comprehensive and often international searches designed to meet the specific needs of our client.