Humanitarian AI Research Fellowship.

NetHope brings together humanitarian, development, and conservation organizations to create a more connected and equitable world through technology. The Humanitarian AI Research Fellow will independently conduct research in either AI adoption and governance or AI systems and localization, producing practical findings, tools, datasets, or other outputs for humanitarian and nonprofit organizations. Fellows will work remotely part-time under guidance from the AI Fellowship Lead and subject-matter experts while following NetHope’s AI, data protection, and research ethics policies.

Responsibilities:

• Documenting real-world lessons and practices, helpful or cautionary from organizations integrating AI tools into their operations
• Building on NetHope's AI readiness work to better capture what adoption looks like in practice at the level of individual implementing partners
• Comparing organizational strategies for AI adoption (direct vendor partnerships, open-source and in-house builds, or off-the-shelf tools) and factors that may drive the choice
• Identifying priority AI safety and governance risks across humanitarian organizations, and practices for risk identification, mitigation, and incident response
• Evaluating open-source and open-weight models, including localized or fine-tuned versions, for humanitarian use cases
• Assessing the relative risks and advantages of local/open systems versus closed, proprietary systems for humanitarian contexts
• Surfacing practical use cases and readiness gaps for AI deployment in resource-constrained or low-connectivity settings; developing a small library of simple, user-friendly tools to solve specific problems
• Contributing to a library of supervised fine-tuning prompts and datasets for humanitarian contexts
• Fellows will work independently within a stream, with guidance and support from the AI Fellowship Lead and periodic check-ins with NetHope subject-matter experts
• Case studies involving NetHope Members or partners require their consent, and NetHope will review all findings before publication
• Fellows will follow NetHope's AI Policy, including completing an AI Disclosure Form before starting, and NetHope's Data Protection Policy
• Research involving personal data or affected communities must meet NetHope's data protection and research ethics requirements