Associate Economist (Temporary Appointment)

Organizational Setting and Work Relationships

Framed by the Global Compact for Refugees (GCR) and UNHCR¿s mission to find solutions to refugee situations, strengthened cooperation with development and private sector partners is essential. The increasing number of refugees and internally displaced persons in protracted displacement situations, together with the increasing scale of irregular migration, large-scale refugee movements, and costs of responding to humanitarian situations, have placed forced displacement high on the global agenda. These elements have further driven the realization that humanitarian support must be complemented by development and private sector actors to lift displaced populations out of poverty, enable solutions, and encourage an area based approach to poverty reduction.

Within UNHCR, the Division of Resilience and Solutions (DRS) was formed to address these challenges, in part by broadening strategic partnerships with key actors in these areas, including importantly the World Bank and other multilateral development banks and in so doing aligning approaches by Government. To support investments by development actors in area based approaches including both forcibly displaced and their hosts, requires better data and standardized information about refugees and host community households, particularly in relation to their socio-economic status or multidimensional poverty status. Accurate data on welfare conditions is also needed for UNHCR and partner operations, including cash, livelihoods, and education programming, welfare targeting and monitoring of the Sustainable Development Goals. Finally, comparable information for both refugees and host community members is a pre-requisite for measuring changes in welfare required to inform medium-term programming with development partners and national governments. DRS together with the World Bank Poverty Global Practice supported by the UNHCR World Bank Joint Data Center manage the partnership and play the global coordination role for the institution in working with National Statistics Offices to include forcibly displaced into National Poverty Assessments.

The Associate Economist will contribute to the Global Compact for Refugees (GCR) objectives: 1 - Ease the pressures on host countries and 2 - Enhance refugee self-reliance. Concretely, the incumbent will contribute to the indicators measuring the success of the GCR and particularly the proportion of refugees living below the national poverty line in the host country. Depending on where s/he is based, the reporting lines will differ. If the Associate Economist is based in Headquarters, s/he will report to the DRS Partnership Analytics Research and Knowledge (PARK) section. If s/he is based in a country or regional office, will report to either the Representative or Deputy Representative (Programme), or in some cases Head of Sub-Office or Senior Operations Officer. In all cases, there will be a dotted line to DRS PARK for technical functional clearance of candidates and for technical oversight of economics products. The Associate Economist will work closely with Programme and Protection colleagues in addition to Senior Management in the operation as well as Bureaux and technical unit key, external stakeholders and development agencies, including the World Bank, government agencies, national statistical agencies, and other operational partners.

All UNHCR staff members are accountable to perform their duties as reflected in their job description. They do so within their delegated authorities, in line with the regulatory framework of UNHCR which includes the UN Charter, UN Staff Regulations and Rules, UNHCR Policies and Administrative Instructions as well as relevant accountability frameworks. In addition, staff members are required to discharge their responsibilities in a manner consistent with the core, functional, cross-functional and managerial competencies and UNHCR's core values of professionalism, integrity and respect for diversity.

Duties
Project Management
- Support the design and implementation of assessments and other data-driven products related to the socio-economic welfare of refugees, forcibly displaced persons and host communities.
- Facilitate and support collaboration with partners and activities in the collection of comparable socio-economic (poverty) data on forcibly displaced.
- Support data collection activities, as appropriate. This may take place at all stages of data collection (preparation, survey design, sampling, onsite data collection oversight and supervision and quality assurance, data analysis and report writing).
- Support data analysis using econometric programs (R, Stata).

Data Collection and Analysis
- Consolidate raw primary and secondary datasets into final datasets to be used for analysis, as needed. This will involve creating and merging various sources of data and may require programming matching algorithms, linking up with field staff for additional information, and performing manual matching.
- Provide secondary data analysis as appropriate.
- Clean datasets and support creation of necessary indicators.
- For any field survey, assist in programming the instrument and support development of protocols to ensure high quality data.
- Prepare and document relevant datasets for archiving on the UNHCR Microdata Library.
- Support the preparation of research papers including formatting and creating tables, graphs, and related analysis.
- Engage with country operation, partners and government, as appropriate, in the design and implementation of data collection and research projects.

Coordination
- Facilitate good communication and coordination among members of the country team, Governments, researchers and partners, serving as a link between these parties.
- Support drafting and writing of presentations, analytical reports, research and policy briefs.
- Identify research opportunities and contribute to proposals for research partnerships and funding.
- Support preparations of reports on achievements in data collection and analysis.

- Perform other related duties as required. Essential minimum qualifications & Professional experience

- Completion of university degree.
- Minimum 3 years of previous relevant work experience with Undergraduate degree; or 2 years with master¿s degree; or 1 year with Doctorate degree.
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See below for this postion's Operational Context
======================================================================================================== Framed by the Global Compact for Refugees (GCR) and UNHCR¿s mission to find solutions to refugee situations, strengthened cooperation with development and private sector partners is essential. The increasing number of refugees and internally displaced persons in protracted displacement situations, together with the increasing scale of irregular migration, large-scale refugee movements, and costs of responding to humanitarian situations, have placed forced displacement high on the global agenda. These elements have further driven the realization that humanitarian support must be complemented by development and private sector actors to lift displaced populations out of poverty, enable solutions, and encourage an area based approach to poverty reduction.

UNHCR has responded to these challenges in part by broadening strategic partnerships with key actors in these areas, including importantly the World Bank and other multilateral development banks and in so doing aligning approaches by Government. To support investments by development actors in area based approaches including both forcibly displaced and their hosts, requires better data and standardized information about refugees and host community households, particularly in relation to their socio-economic status or multidimensional poverty status. Accurate data on welfare conditions is also needed for UNHCR and partner operations, including cash, livelihoods, and education programming, welfare targeting and monitoring of the Sustainable Development Goals. Finally, comparable information for both refugees and host community member is a pre-requisite for measuring changes in welfare required to inform medium-term programming with development partners and national governments. At the corporate level, the UNHCR Division of Resilience and Solutions, together with the World Bank Poverty Global Practice, supported by the UNHCR-World Bank Joint Data Center manage the partnership and play the global coordination role for the institution in working with National Statistics Offices to include forcibly displaced into National Poverty Assessments.

The Economist will contribute to the Global Compact for Refugees (GCR) objectives: 1 - Ease the pressures on host countries and 2 - Enhance refugee self-reliance. Concretely, the Economist will contribute to the indicators measuring the success of the Global Compact for Refugees and particularly the Proportion of refugees living below the national poverty line in the host country while engaging with national and international partners to expand the amount and availability of relevant socioeconomic data and in turn the evidence base on forced displacement. Activities may include support to data collection activities, impact evaluations and other research and analytical activities.

The Colombia Economist will report to the Senior Development Officer, while offering technical support on data and analysis to other business units. In all cases, there will be a dotted line to DRS Partnerships Service for technical functional clearance of candidates and for technical oversight of economics products. The Economist will work closely with Programme and Protection colleagues, the Global Data Service and DIMAs, in addition to Senior Management in the operation as well as Bureaux and technical unit key external stakeholders and development agencies, including the World Bank, government agencies, national statistical agencies, and other operational partners. The Colombia Economist may also support the Senior Development Officer to provide technical assistance to other operations in the regional affected by the Venezuela Situation. Closing date 2 December 11:59 Geneve Time.