Mozilla Foundation Tech + Society Fellowship

Fellowship programme to enable experienced technologists to partner with civil society organisations in Global Majority settings in MENA, Brazil, India and East Africa and employ their expertise to enhance the organisations’ capability to address societal issues that intersect with technology.

The Mozilla Foundation and Ford Foundation co-sponsor the Tech + Society Fellowships to enable experienced technologists to partner with civil society organisations in Global Majority settings to design and implement a strategy that engages specific regional societal issues with technology to enhance the impact of the organisations’ work and also strengthen leadership of public interest technologists in the regions.

The fellowship programme focuses on fostering connections between tech-and-society strategists and civil society organisations to layer impactful technology into their work and community engagement, and help realise a more just digital world.

The fellowship is an opportunity for technologists and civil society organisations, each with their own unique areas of expertise, to work in collaboration with one another and the cohort in shared purpose. Fellows should expect to:

• Contribute to the impact of their host organisations in a way that leverages technology to further the organisation’s cause or to mitigate potential harms.
• Partner with civil society organisations to advance societal issues as they converge with technology and ensure the voices of their communities are represented in wider efforts toward a more just digital world.
• Develop a deeper understanding of how to effectively engage in movement building work using their tech-related skills.
• Work on independent, aligned work that focuses on tools or resources that benefit the public interest in the region.

The host civil society organisations are based in Global Majority settings in MENA, India, Brazil, Mexico and East Africa. Fellows will be expected to split their time working on an independent project, as well as collaborating closely with an organisation to support them from a technology perspective to increase the impact on the host organisations ’communities.

Fellows and host organisations will collaboratively build a plan for how to best approach the issues that both have identified as priorities to address over the course of the fellowship, taking into consideration pertinent dependencies and parameters.