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Project Director, USAID Analytical Services V (ASV)

Position: Project Director, USAID Analytical Services V (ASV)

Location: Remote/Washington DC

Integra is seeking Project Director candidates for an upcoming proposal on the multi-year Analytical Services V contract. This mechanism will provide the Bureau for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance’s Center of Excellence on Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance (DCHA/DRG) with the means to support US foreign policy objectives by promoting resilient, democratic societies. Support for DRG is vital to the pursuit of freedom and national security and is essential to achieve the Agency’s and the US Government’s broader social and economic development goals. The IDIQ will directly build on USAID’s DRG Strategy by supporting USAID Missions and other operating units to develop strategies and projects that will have the greatest impact.

Responsibilities:

  • Provide overall leadership and technical direction throughout the project’s life with a focus on achieving results as described in the contract.
  • Provide technical inputs on select activity proposal efforts.
  • Serve as a primary point of contact for USAID staff and relevant stakeholders, reporting on progress, assessing evolving needs, and communicating lessons learned.
  • Contribute to technical work products, provide quality assurance, and own the delivery of high-value reports and workshops to USAID clients.
  • Work with Integra home-office staff in personnel, contract administration and financial management of the overall project.

REQUIREMENTS:

  • Advanced degree in economics, statistics, sociology, international development or other social science fields.
  • Minimum of 10 years of experience in MEL and research activities for international development.
  • Minimum of 5 years of experience in direct management or oversight of USAID projects.
  • Experience working with USAID/DRG, BHA or OTI preferred.
  • Expertise in democratic governance, participation and inclusion, DEIA, free and fair elections, promoting independent media, civic engagement, rule of law, human rights, e-governance and digital democracy, anti-corruption, and countering authoritarianism highly preferred.
  • Proficiency in USAID regulations, FAR, ADS, procurement procedures, and contract compliance.
  • Experience managing teams of internal staff and consultants resulting in successful project delivery, with a strong preference for experience in managing the concurrent implementation of multiple task orders under similar IDIQ mechanisms.
  • Demonstrated experience in technical proposal writing skills for USAID, Department of State, Millennium Challenge Corporation, or other donors for procurement opportunities.
  • The ability to produce high-quality technical work expeditiously and independently.
  • Strong people skills evidenced by client and team management experience, including through Project Manager roles.
  • Proficiency in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Remuneration Package: A competitive package would be offered based on salary history and
work experience.

HOW TO APPLY:  Qualified and interested candidates should submit a cover letter and CV to jobs@integrallc.com. Please include “Project Director, USAID Analytical Services V (ASV)” in the subject line of the e-mail. No phone calls please. Only short-listed candidates will be contacted.

Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted.

Integra provides equal employment to all participants and employees without regard to race, color, religion, gender, age, disability, sexual orientation, veteran or marital status.

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2011: A revolutionary year in democracy and governance

"Mohamed suffered a lot. He worked hard. But when he set fire to himself, it wasn't about his scales being confiscated. It was about his dignity." —Mannoubia Bouazizi, Tunisia Photograph by Peter Hapak for TIME

2011 will be remembered as the year that democratic awakening occurred in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Activists used information and communication technology (ICT) tools to organize and coordinate political demonstrations that brought an end to long-standing regimes and paved the way to landmark elections.

Time Magazine fittingly awarded the “Person of the Year” accolade to the protester. What would come to be known as the “Arab Spring” began in Tunisia’s under-developed town of Sidi Bouzid, where the late Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor whose wares were confiscated by the police, set himself on fire outside of a government building in December 2010. Few would have predicted that Bouazizi’s actions would trigger an uprising that brought an end to Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s 23-year-old regime on January 14th.

Video clips of the first protests, including demonstrations at the spot where Bouazizi set-himself on fire, were recorded on mobile phones, posted on YouTube, and spread across Tunisia and in the Arab world when they were shared on Facebook before news media outlets such as Al Jazeera began running their stories, reports Robert Mackey in the New York Times.

The Tunisian revolutionary spirit spread in neighboring Egypt. Inspired by events in Tunsia, political demonstrations began in January as thousands took to the streets in anti-government protests against poverty, rampant unemployment, corruption, and demanding an end to the 30-year autocratic rule of President Hosni Mubarak, writes Cara Parks in The Huffington Post.

Aware of the potent effect that social media had in Tunisia’s uprising, the Egyptian government blocked Facebook, Twitter, and later Internet services to lead a crackdown on the largest protests the country had witnessed since 1970s, according to Parks. Despite violent clashes with the riot police, protests  kept going not only in Cairo, the capital, but also in Alexandria and Suez, and two other major cities.

Photo Credit: Huffington Post

The revolution’s main goal was achieved with the resignation of President Mubarak on February 11th. Activist Wael Ghonim, a marketing manager for Google who played a significant role in organizing the January 25 protests by reaching out to young Egyptians on Facebook, credited the social networking site for the success of the Egyptian people’s uprising, says Catharine Smith in The Huffington Post.

“[…] This revolution started on Facebook. […] We would post a video on Facebook that would be shared by 60,000 people on their walls within a few hours. I’ve always said that if you want to liberate a society just give them the Internet. […],” Ghonim told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in an interview that Facebook and the Internet were responsible for the uprising in Egypt.

After Egypt, it was the turn of Syrians to protest against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Pro-democratic demonstrations began in January and young Syrians, inspired by the ousting of Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt, began organizing protests online and then took them to the streets.

In this citizen journalism image made on a mobile phone, Syrian men carry bread loaves during a protest against Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime, in the coastal town of Banias, Syria, May 3, 2011 Photo Credit: AP

Syrian activists have been working their computers and mobile phones, updating Facebook pages, sending out messages over Twitter, and uploading videos onto YouTube to inform the outside world of what was taking place in their surroundings since foreign reporters were banned, reports Margaret Besheer for VOA news.

Libya was the revolution’s next stop in North Africa . Protests broke out in February in the eastern city of Benghazi and escalated to an armed conflict as forces loyal to Muammar  Gaddafi clashed with anti-government rebels. Gaddafi was captured and killed on October 24 bringing an end to four decades of autocratic rule.

Libya Crisis Map illustrates how ICTs can be applied in a conflict situation. This web-based platform was created by the Standby Task Force, and used the Ushahidi crowdsourced crisis reporting system to map latest news from Libya gleaned from Twitter and traditional news sources.

The LibyaCrisisMap platform was activated by the request of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) to the Standby Task Force (SBTF). The platform was fully handed over to OCHA supervision in April 2011, and continued to be supported by a team of volunteers until June 4th of 2011.

 

Yemenis also took up the streets in February to protest against President Ali Abdullah Saleh calling for his resignation. Saleh agreed a deal, in which he will transfer power to his deputy by February 2012, ahead of elections. Young Yemeni Activists are however angry that the deal guarantees immunity for Mr Saleh and his allies, reports the BBC.

The Kingdom of Bahrain, with financial, equipment and manpower backing from its Saudi neighbor, is the only government in the MENA region to  have successfully crushed pro-democracy demonstrations, reports Adrian Humphreys in the National Post.

Revolutions in the spring paved the way to landmark elections in the fall.

Tunisian politicians engaged voters via YouTube ahead of the October 23rd elections of representative for the new Constituent Assembly, which will ratify a new constitution and appoint a new transitional government that will schedule elections for a permanent government. Tunisia Live, a startup news portal,  launched Tunisia Talks on YouTube where citizens asked questions to politicians.

Egyptians also queued up in numbers at polling stations in the country’s first democratic elections. Citizens took up the responsibility to monitor the electoral process blogging and Tweeting about irregularities and fraudulent activities. Parliamentary elections will end in March and Presidential elections are scheduled for mid-2012.

ICTs in form of social media platforms, cell phones, and the Internet played a significant role in the push for democracy and governance not only in the MENA region but also throughout the world.

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From the Arab Spring to the Russian Winter?

In another case of authoritarian regime vs. public protesters, information and communication technologies (ICTs) seem to have fueled the fire. Russians took to the streets last weekend in social media-driven demonstrations against alleged election fraud committed by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s United Russia Party, in the biggest protest the country has ever witnessed since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Russian opposition activists have used Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms to uncover electoral fraud and organize protests. Such is the case of Danila Lindele, 23-year-old citizen activist,  described by VOA News as a “new breed of Russian activist, one more likely to reach for an iPad than a bullhorn.”

Despite conceding that irregularities did occur during the electoral process, President Dmitry Medvedev criticized the protests using his official Facebook page.

“I agree neither with the slogans, nor the statements voiced at the protests,” President Medvedev said. Russians responded with insults such as “shame” and “pathetic”, according to VOA News.

BBC reports that at least “7,000 comments had appeared under his post by 20:00 GMT on Sunday, a day after the biggest anti-government protests since Soviet times. An early random sample showed the comments were equally divided between hostility, support and neutrality.”

Authorities carried out over 1,000 arrests, mostly in Moscow, and key protester, blogger and anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny was jailed, the BBC said.

Global Voices, an online platform for bloggers from around the world who report on how citizens use the Internet and social media to make their voices heard, often translating from other languages, features posts by prominent Russian bloggers such as Navalny in their Russia 2011 Elections Special.

“The time has come to throw off the chains. We are not cattle or slaves. We have a voice and we have the strength to defend it,” Mr. Navalny blogged.

Navalny also posted a video of Putin’s speech at the Olimpiysky Sports Complex to illustrate the Prime Minister’s declining popularity as evidenced by boos he received from segments of the crowd.

http://youtu.be/ZxQslFifQBw

Blogger Sean Guillory points out that election fraud is not novel practice in Russian politics and refers to Leontii Byzov, a senior sociologist from the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences to explain why the largest anti-government protests is taking place now.

“There are several overlapping factors. First, the rise of a new generation of young people who don’t remember the ‘trauma of the 1990s’. They are not afraid of change, it is more attractive to them than the ‘gilded cage’ of Putinist stability. Young members of the middle class want social mobility and dream about meteoric careers,” said Byzov.

“Another factor is the swelling internal opposition within the Russian elite. In the 2000s, Putin served as a certain guarantor of balance between elite groups with completely opposite interests,” added Byzov. The tensions between the Putin-backed siloviki and liberals supporters of Medvedev are entangled in a power struggle over the control Gazprom and other state corporations.

Columnist DOĞU ERGİL argues that ICT tools in the form of social media platform, the Internet and cell phones can compensate for a lack of an opposition to an authoritarian regime, pointing to the power to connect millions and allow individuals to share messages and act in relative concert, that these platforms and networks possess.

“The Tahrir Square protest are the best example of what a virtual community can create in the absence of organized opposition,” he said.

As it was the case in Egypt and Tunisia, Russia has a strong, authoritarian leadership. ICTs are helping challenge the authoritarian state structure, as evinced by the recent anti-government demonstrations, and despite the Kremlin’s crackdown and control of the media, ERGİL argues.

In fact, two-thirds of Russians are said to be utilizing ICTs, especially the mobile phone network and blogging. The political space created by these tools enable exchanges that narrows the ideological divides and strengthen opposition to a government determined to sustain its grip on society as long as it can.

According to the BBC, “as many as 50,000 people gathered on an island near the Kremlin to condemn alleged ballot-rigging in parliamentary elections and demand a re-run” “The protesters alleged there was widespread fraud in the December 4th polls though the ruling United Russia party did see its share of the vote fall sharply.”

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ICT4Democracy in East Africa

Launched in June, ICT for Democracy in East Africa is a network of organizations seeking to leverage the potential of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to enhance good governance and strengthen democracy.

This initiative is funded by the Swedish Program for ICT in Developing Regions (SPIDER) and aims to promote collaboration amongst democracy actors in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. Member organizations in the network are Kenya’s iHub, the Kenyan Human Rights Commission (KHRC), the Collaboration on International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa (CIPESA), Women of Uganda Network (WOUGNET), Transparency International Uganda (TIU), and Tanzania’s Commission for Human Rights and Good Governance (CHRAGG).

iHub, an open space for the tech community in Kenya, hosted a governance workshop in October.  The event brought together stakeholders in academia, government, civil society and the tech community to identify governance challenges—such as an uninformed or misinformed citizenry about their basic rights and an entrenched culture of corruption. The take away from the session was that ICTs—particularly mobile phones—provide citizens with the platform by which they can engage in governance solutions in a discreet, personalized way, anytime, anywhere.

In the wake of 2012 Presidential elections, citizens need to be better educated, informed and engaged in the political processes to avoid post-elections clashes as it was the case in 2007. To this end, KHRC plans to tap into the potential of ICTs to increase citizen participation, monitor human rights violations, monitor the electoral processes, monitor government fulfillment of promises, carry out campaigns and also inform and educate its constituents and the public on various human rights and governance issues.

Civic participation and democracy monitoring is relatively weak in Uganda given that only 59% of registered voters cast their ballots in the February 2011 presidential elections, according to SPIDER. The proliferation of ICT tools, their potential to enhance communication and improve access to important information creates an opportunity for improved citizen engagement and advocacy towards increased transparency and accountability.

Through the strategic use of ICTs, Women of Uganda Network (WOUGNET), aims to improve access to public services, increase efficiency, transparency and accountability of government and political processes to ensure that citizens are informed about government functions and promote efficient service delivery.

WOUGNET will particularly target women, in community based organizations (CBOs) located in the rural districts of Northern Uganda.  WOUGNET aims build the ICT capacity of these (CBOs)  to monitor public service delivery as part of its anti-corruption strategy.

Similarly, Tanzania’s CHRAGG is implementing a project that will create  a system that will enable citizens to file complaints, check the status of already filed complaints and receive feedback through SMS. The project will help poor Tanzanians forego the transportation lodging costs involved in filing complaints in far off regional offices.

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Egyptians queue up for second-day of landmark elections in post-Mubarak era

Voters are turning out in numbers at polling stations in major cities for the first elections since President Hosni Mubarak was overthrown. So far, the electoral process has been peaceful with few reported security concerns amid fears that polling could be delayed due to the deadly protests against the interim military regime.

Some Internet activists chose to boycott elections in protest of military rule whilst others have taken up the responsibility to monitor elections using social media tools. Tardiness of judges, missing allots, and inadequate security have led to delays causing long lines at polling stations, and there has been reports of apparent violations of the election code by some political parties. However, these expected shortcomings have not dented voters’ enthusiasm.

“They’re trying to make it delayed so that we get angry and go home,” a man cried outside a still-closed polling center in the poor, mixed neighborhood of Shoubra, an hour after it was meant to open, reports Joshua Hersh of the Huffington Post. “But we’ll show them. We will stay here and we will vote.”

Another voter exclaimed, “I am so happy; this is the first true election in the history of Egypt!” The old man added, “I am doing this for my sons and my grandsons.”

According to Robert Mackey in the New York Times, bloggers posted images of long lines at polling places. Kamal El Eid, 19, posted a photograph of the vast crowd inside her polling place in the Cairo district of Heliopolis. Ranya Khalifa, who also voted in Heliopolis, tweeted that it took her six hours to get to the front of the line.

Voters crowded into a polling place in Cairo’s Heliopolis neighborhood on Monday.

Bloggers also reported on voting irregularities such as breaking electoral law: campaigning in on Election Day.

According to Hersh, twitter was filled with reports, through the hashtag #egypviolations, that party workers for the Freedom & Justice Party (FJP), the political wing of the Brotherhood, were distributing campaign guides to voters in line.

Abdel-Rahman Hussein tweeted that several parties campaigned on Election Day by sitting with laptops outside polling places in Cairo offering to help voters look up the registration numbers they needed to cast their ballots and giving out flyers promoting their candidates.

http://youtu.be/52ziVn6A-Gg

The party responded that this was merely an attempt to assist voters who supported the party but were confused about the process, rather than attempt to campaign or coerce voters, Hersh explained.

Mosa’ab Elshamy, an activist at the heart of the Tahrir Square protests in February, witnessed “no significant violations in Zamalek,” an upscale part of Cairo and added that although few people from different parties were handing leaflets, most voters were “not interest” in the literature anyway, writes Mackey.

Bloggers also expressed concerns over the complicated voting process. Issandr El Amrani, the Moroccan-American journalist behind The Arabist, a Cairo-based blog, posted close-up images of the remarkably dense and confusing ballot papers voters were handed inside a polling station in the city’s Sayeda Zeinab district. Mr. Amrani explained that voters were asked to select two candidates from a list of 122 names who could only be distinguished by a small icon chosen by the would-be office holders.

This is the first of three separate polls over coming months, which includes the current elections of 508-memnber People’s Assembly or lower house set to end on 10 January 2012. Elections of 270-strong Shura Council or upper house will begin in 29 January and end on 11 March 2012. Presidential elections are due mid-2012. It is estimated that more than 40 political parties are set to compete, fielding more than 10,000 candidates.

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Ushahidi maps Liberia’s electoral violence

Liberia’s November 8  Presidential runoff was marred by a rally turned violent as opposition supporters clashed with the riot police. The Ushahidi platform, a website developed to map reports of violence during the 2007 Presidential elections in Kenya, was once again in use to keep citizens informed on elections proceedings.

Incumbent Ellen Johnson Sirleaf won re-election clinching 90% of the November 8 run-off despite a relatively low turn out of 37%, prompted by the boycott of opposition candidate Winston Tubman from the Congress for Democratic Change (CDC) on the basis of electoral fraud.

Ushahidi provides maps on various aspects of the electoral process, including the violent protests that took place in the capital Monrovia in the lead up and after the runoff.

The rioting broke out after thousands of CDC supporters gathered outside party headquarters to urge voters to boycott polls. BBC confirms that at least one man has been killed and four others injured after shots were fired by the police.

Despite the runoff boycott, Tubman is willing to work with Johnson-Sirleaf’s government.

“I will stick with my party and maybe we can find someone in our party who can deal with the Unity Party government and Mrs Sirleaf to bring about reconciliation,” he told the BBC’s Network Africa programme.

Observers, including those from the Economic Community of West Africa States (ECOWAS), declared the election process to be credible.

“The mission wishes to state that it found no major irregularities in the voting process itself. It considers, on the whole, that the elections of 8 November met the acceptable conditions of being free, fair and transparent,” the ECOWAS observer team said in a statement.

These are the first elections organised by Liberians since the 14-year conflict ended. The previous ones were run by the large UN peacekeeping mission.

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DRC elections: ICTs to inspire women to run for office

Female candidates are turning out in numbers to learn how information and communication technologies (ICTs) can enhance their candidacies in upcoming elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

The country will be holding its presidential and parliamentary elections for the second time in its history on November 28. Women were significantly under-represented during the 2006 elections. According to the National Democratic Institute (NDI), less than 1,100 out of 9,000 candidates for parliament were women.

In the hope of building on previous elections’ outcomes, the International Knowledge Network of Women in Politics (iKNOW Politics) conducted a campaign workshop aimed at inspiring DRC women to run for office, training them in ICT skills.

Mariam Diallo, the sub-Saharan Africa coordinator for iKNOW Politics, gave participants tutorials on how to use the network’s website which allows users to share information, ask questions to international experts, and take part in e-discussion on various political topics.

According to NDI, participants were also taught how to use social media and the Internet for political campaigning, to manage and plan an election campaign; and conduct political communications.

A similar campaign was conducted in Afghanistan during the 2009 provincial council elections with positive results.

Salam Watandar, Internews’ radio programming service funded by USAID, carried out an outreach campaign encouraging women to run for office after it emerged that not a single female candidate had registered for provincial council elections in eight provinces. The message to women was clear: it is your duty to run for council, Internews press release reveals.

Afghan women responded to the call. The Independent Election Commission reported that a total of 342 women had registered for 124 seats on provincial councils around the country.

 

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Liberia Elections: ICTs to ensure transparency

 

As Liberians prepare to elect a new President during the November 8 election run-off, the African Election Project (AEP) is using information and communication technologies (ICTs) to assist in monitoring the electoral process.

According to Africa News, citizens will be able to report election violence to the “Incidence Monitoring Platform”, a newly-established call center, and via SMS. Election observers and field officers are using social media tools to co-ordinate information transmission throughout the country. Moreover, cutting-edge call center software and a news database software are in place to track elections activities in real time.

“The use of ICT during this elections coverage will bring about transparency in the whole electoral process, ensure the timely release of electoral news to citizens residing in Liberia and in the Diaspora, issue alerts to the relevant institutions to prevent potential incidence of violence and to ensure credibility in the final outcome of the elections,” Mr Jerry Sam Director of AEP, said.

Established in 2008 by the Institute for ICT Journalism in strategic partnership with the Open Society Initiative, AEP aims to enable citizen and journalists to provide timely and relevant information and knowledge while undertaking monitoring specific and important aspects of governance. One of its objectives consist of providing relevant ICT tools for stakeholders involved in the electoral process.

Incumbent and recent Nobel Laureate, President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, gained the most votes but failed to pass the 50% threshold needed for outright victory in last week’s elections. Despite fraud allegations, opposition leader Winston Tubman, a former UN diplomat, has agreed to contest the run off.

BBC reports that with 96% of the vote counted, Johnson-Sirleaf has 44% against 32% for Mr Tubman, the electoral commission announced. Turnout was 71%.

 

 

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