gov2ai MENAPOINT Conference Iraq 718–20 September 2026 · Erbil, Iraq

By role

Communications and campaigns

You are the one who has to say it in three languages by Thursday.

This is you if you turn everyone else's work into posts, newsletters and campaign material, usually alone.

What your week looks like

A report lands on Monday and it has to become a thread, a newsletter, a press line and a caption, in Arabic, in Kurdish, and probably in English for the donor. You are usually one person, and the deadline does not move because there is only one of you. The machine draft comes back fast, and it comes back subtly wrong in the language your audience actually speaks.

Start with these three tasks

  1. Drafting reports and advocacy material
  2. Translation into and out of local languages
  3. Monitoring news and social media at scale

Tools you can actually afford

  • ChatGPT

    Never for sensitive materialHas a free versionWorks in Iraq

  • Claude

    Never for sensitive materialHas a free versionWorks in Iraq

  • Google Gemini

    Never for sensitive materialHas a free versionWorks in Iraq

  • Canva

    Careful with sensitive materialHas a free versionWorks in Iraq

  • Notion AI

    Careful with sensitive materialHas a free versionWorks in Iraq

  • DeepL

    Careful with sensitive materialHas a free versionWorks in Iraq

  • Check (by Meedan)

    Careful with sensitive materialHas a free versionWe do not know whether it works in Iraq

Never do this

  • Never publish a machine translation that no fluent speaker has read. Sorani especially: the tools are weakest exactly where your audience is.
  • Never publish a number, a date or a quote the tool produced. Copy those from the source document by hand, every time.
  • Never put an unannounced campaign, an embargoed statement, or a partner list into an online tool. A campaign leaks before it launches or not at all.

Your first hour

  1. 15 minutes. Take a post you already published in Arabic or Kurdish. Ask a tool to translate the English original of it.
  2. 15 minutes. Compare its version with your published one, line by line. What it got wrong here is what it will get wrong next time.
  3. 20 minutes. Ask a colleague who speaks the language to mark the three worst errors. Keep that page: it is your check-list for every draft from now on.
  4. 10 minutes. Write the one rule you will not break, usually “no translation goes out unread by a human”, and say it out loud in the next team meeting.

Case studies

Recipes

Last checked: 2026-08-31