Hardship Level (not applicable for home-based)H (no hardship)
Family Type (not applicable for home-based)
Family
Staff Member / Affiliate TypeUNOPS IICA2
Target Start Date2024-05-01
Job Posting End DateMay 7, 2024
Terms of ReferencePolicy, Operational and Organisational context
With limited opportunities for sustainable return, local integration and resettlement, forced displacement has become increasingly protracted. In addition, the vast majority of the world’s forcibly displaced and stateless people live in developing and fragile countries, in areas characterized by fragile economies, weak public services, and reliance on international assistance. Meanwhile, new humanitarian crises continue to unfold. As a result of this situation, the humanitarian system, which is neither designed nor sufficiently funded to provide long-term support, is increasingly overstretched.
In response to this situation, the international community has since 2015 adopted critical recommendations and global commitments to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and sustainability of the humanitarian system and to increase collaboration across the humanitarian-development-peace nexus. These include the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda adopted in 2015, the Grand Bargain of the 2026 World Humanitarian Summit, the 20216 New York Declaration on Refugees and Migrants, the 2018 Global Compact on Refugees and the 2019 OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) recommendation on the humanitarian-development-peace nexus. Most recently, the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Internal Displacement focused on how to prevent, response and achieve solutions to the increasingly protracted nature of internal displacement, with a UN Special Advisor now forming recommendations on how key organizations including IOM, UNHCR and UNDP work together on internal displacement issues.
In line with these recommendations, it has become a growing corporate priority for UNHCR to increase collaboration with development actors and to emphasize the strengthening of inclusive and resilient national systems and self-reliance approaches to advance more sustainable and long-term protection and solutions. UNHCR's Focus Area Strategic Plan on engaging Development actors articulate the 2022/26 vision in that respect defining five high impact actions and three global enablers to achieve the vision. To facilitate these shifts, UNHCR also executed fundamental business transformations. Critically this included a change to the Organization’s planning systems from a one-year needs-based focus to a multi-year and results-based focus.
A long-term system-strengthening approach lies at the core of UNHCR’s protection mandate and its supervisory responsibility. Since its establishment, UNHCR fulfilled this responsibility through, for example, law and policy advocacy, public information, State and civil society capacity-development and technical assistance on registration, documentation, refugee or statelessness determination, legal aid, and commentaries on national legislative and policy initiatives to assist law and policy makers in securing civil-political, social, economic, and cultural rights of the people UNHCR serves. The changes to UNHCR’s systems and focus on long-term development approaches provide UNHCR’s protection teams with the tremendous opportunity to deliver its protection work with greater scale and impact and enhanced sustainability. However, as set out in the 2023 Multilateral Organisation Performance Assessment Network (MOPAN) report, to effectively work within the new systems and fulfil a longer-term approach, cultural changes and incentives are needed for staff across the organisation. Evaluations on UNHCR’s engagement in the humanitarian-development nexus highlight that this is particularly needed for the protection workforce.
The position
The position is situated in the Development Mainstreaming Unit (DMU) in UNHCR’s Division of International Protection (DIP). DIP is responsible for ensuring global coherence and quality in the way UNHCR delivers its supervisory responsibility and broader protection mandate in line with relevant international legal and policy standards. DMU provides strategic advice and operational support on the protection dimensions of the humanitarian-development-peace nexus while ensuring the centrality of Protection within this agenda. The Unit supports protection staff members to pursue longer-term inclusion and resilience approaches to protection into national system, and to leverage the influence, capacity and resources of development agendas to advance UNHCR’s protection mandate and supervisory responsibility. The Unit also monitors and oversees UNHCR’s implementation of the protection-development milestones in UNHCR’s focus area strategic plan. It also tracks and documents the protection and solutions dividends of development collaboration. The DMU has a cross-cutting function in DIP and works closely with the technical teams in the Division. It also supports and guide the protection teams in UNHCR’s Bureaux and Operations. DMU also works very closely with other HQ Divisions, in particular the Division of Resilience and Solutions (DRS) which leads on the development and management of strategic partnerships with all categories of development partners of non-transactional nature.
The Policy Officer works under the direct supervision of the Senior Policy Officer in the DMU and in close collaboration with the Division of Resilience and Solutions (DRS), UNHCR Bureaus and Operations.
Duties and responsibilities
The Individual Contractor will be responsible for supporting the objectives of the Development Mainstreaming Unit (DMU) through the following duties and responsibilities:
Objective 1:
Assist in the delivery of high-quality protection analysis to inform policy dialogue and programming with development partners.
DMU supports Bureaus and operations in the delivery of high-quality protection analysis to inform policy dialogue and programming with development partners. By now, development partners such as the World Bank, request such analysis in 32 countries. The analysis follows a specific methodology derived protection reports, assessments and consultations with the World Bank, Member States, NGOs and wide range of stakeholders. The analysis should be written in a manner that helps external partners to understand the aspects of the laws, policies, practices pertaining to the national protection environments that need to improve or change in order to accelerate sustainable access and enjoyment of the rights. Duties and responsibilities of the Individual Contractor include:
• Ensure that the guidance is clear, up to date easy to find and understandable to the protection and development focal points in operations. This includes the timelines and drafting and clearing process. Special attention will be dedicated to the operations that do operate mainly in French.
• Facilitate an effective in-house coordination to deliver the protection analysis on time.
• Support operations in completing accurate and high-quality analysis by researching on law and policy frameworks and their implementation, collecting protection data and analysis from various corporate tools and products. This requires researching within DIP and beyond including exploring and using data and analysis collected via RiMAP (Right Mapping Analysis Platform), protection monitoring data, reports produced by the UNHCR-World Bank Joint Data Center, ILO refugee law reports and other development, humanitarian, and peace actors data and reports.
• Support the RiMAP team to ensure that relevant data streams and related analysis on the policy, law and pratices can be pooled into the platform RiMAP via inter-operability and AI to accelerate the production of protection analysis for development partners.
• Ensure analysis is drafted in a high-quality manner in English and French and complies with the existing format standards. Support French-speaking operations in the translation of their analysis in English as well as the translation into French of the guidance documents and protection analysis.
• Work with DIP Information Management (IM) capacity to deliver the corporate IM requirements for the protection analysis: production of country maps, population statistics, demographic trends, and age, gender and diversity graphs and statistical data.
• Work with DIP’IM staff to visualize country trends in the protection policy environment as set out in the protection analysis (eg.. legal and practical changes in access to work, freedom of movement, or access to justice and other national social services that can serve as evidence of UNHCR’s responsibility to monitor protection advancements and inform protection advocacy asks with development partners.
• Act as focal point, in collaboration, with the DMU staff, for the overall production of a defined number of country protection analysis
Objective 2 :
Support in analyzing, documenting, and monitoring the protection outcomes of development engagement.
DIP has a responsibility to ensure global coherence and quality of the protection response as well as to advance protection and comprehensive durable solutions through global advocacy. As part of this global monitoring and policy advocacy function, the Unit produces an annual global report on the protection dividends of UNHCR’s development engagement. To this end, DMU works with Bureaus and Operations to identify and agree on the protection priorities to monitor and advance with development partners. T. Specific Duties and Responsibilities include:
• Maintain a clear overview of protection priorities identified by operations and Bureaus for monitoring and advancing with development partners.
• Facilitate the storage of these priorities on relevant knowledge management platforms and sharing with the relevant staff in operations, bureaus and HQ senior management . This includes the development of concise and visually attractive overviews of protection priorities in countries and regions, country briefs that would be instrumental to draft talking points for senior management on the priorities etc.
• Stay abreast of missions and events to ensure protection priorities to advance with development partners are included in briefing packages.
• Review the methodology of the 2022 protection dividends report, collect feedback with operations and suggest improvement.
• Assist with the collection of case studies from operations, analyze relevant data and document the protection dividends for the purpose of issuing the annual report.
Objective 3:
Support materials and learning opportunities on development engagement and mainstreaming, systems strengthening and inclusion for UNHCR Protection workforce
DIP also has the responsibility to pursue global learning and development of UNHCR protection workforce. In many operations, protection staff continue to lack confidence and incentive to meaningfully engage with development partners and to devise long- term development-oriented protection strategies To address this issue, DMU’s advices and works with staff on approaches to advance protection priorities through new ways of working within UHCR and with development partners. A key milestone for 2024-2025 is that UNHCR staff have the materials to engage development partners in discussions to help them to pursue protection objectives. Specific duties and responsibilities of the individual contractor include:
• Support to the development of learning materials that effectively communicate key learning messages.
• Contribute to the conception and design of visuals , the drafting of short messages and the production of videos that practically demonstrate and unpack new concepts and ways of working.
• Ensure the consistent storing and dissemination of learning materials via UNHCR’s communities of practice for protection and development staff and other learning channels.
Essential minimum qualifications and professional experience required
Education:
University degree in Social Sciences, Anthropology, Sociology, Communication, History, Journalisms, Law, Human Rights, Political Science, International Affairs, Management, Economics, Development Studies or other relevant fields.
Experience:
At least 5 years of experience working in a research and analysis function studying country-level trends in low and middle-income countries in Africa and MENA regions on economics, public discourse, human rights, peace, development, forced displacement or law and policy or other relevant field.
At least 5 years of experience in policy advocacy and effective communication
At least 5 years of experience in knowledge management
At least 2 years of experience in working with bi/multilateral donor agencies, development and/or peacebuilding partners.
Experience in facilitation and change management is desirable.
Experience in protection programming for refugee and/or IDP and/or stateless persons p is desirable.
Competencies:
Key Competencies
Excellent applied policy analysis skills across political, social, economic and cultural sectors.
Excellent drafting skills.
Excellent communication and knowledge management skills: advanced MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Sharepoint applications are a must. Experience in design and communication applications such as CANVA are desirable.
Theoretical and/or applied understanding of law and policy change, policy advocacy.
Theoretical and applied understanding of development and peacebuilding partners, global strategies and operational processes; and of the humanitarian system, and how humanitarian, development and peacebuilding systems inter-relate and complement each other.
Theoretical and/or applied understanding of international legal standards for refugee, IDP and stateless persons is required.
Ability to think creatively, and to explore, harness and translate innovative concepts into practice.
Excellent communication and listening skills, including the ability to solicit, apply and integrate inputs from others into materials.
Good planning, prioritizing and self-management skills to work both independently and as part of a team.
Languages
Excellent knowledge of English is required.
French is desirable
Location
The successful candidate will be home-based. The Contractor might be expected to undertake 3 one-week missions from home to Geneva for consultation and potential missions abroad to HQs or Regional Offices of the development partners to deliver/facilitate the training sessions when deemed appropriate (3-4 maximum).
Conditions
It concerns a full-time contract (40 hours per week) and will receive a monthly payment.
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Skills
Education
Certifications
Work Experience
Other informationHome-based UNOPSThis position doesn't require a functional clearance
Home-BasedYes