Community-based Protection Assistant

Details

Mission and objectives

UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, is a global organization dedicated to saving lives, protecting rights and building a better future for refugees, forcibly displaced communities and stateless people. We work to ensure that everybody has the right to seek asylum and find safe refuge, having fled violence, persecution, war or disaster at home. Since 1950, we have faced multiple crises on multiple continents, and provided vital assistance to refugees, asylum-seekers, internally displaced and stateless people, many of whom have nobody left to turn to. We help to save lives and build better futures for millions forced from home.

Context

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is an international organization with the mandate to assist persons in need of international protection: asylum seekers, refugees, stateless and internally displaced persons. The UNHCR operation in Mozambique has its main office in Maputo and field offices in Nampula and Pemba, where this position is located. The working language in the UNHCR offices in Mozambique is English. The Community-Based Protection Assistant is a member of the Protection Unit and will report to Community-Based Protection Officer in the Protection Unit. Under the overall direction of the Protection Unit, and in coordination with other UNHCR staff, government, NGO partners and other stakeholders, the incumbent works directly with communities of concern to identify the risks they face and to leverage their capacities to protect themselves, their families and communities. S/he supports the application of community-based protection standards, operational procedures and practices in community-based protection delivery at the field level. To fulfil this role, the Community-Based Protection Assistant is required to spend a substantial percentage of the workday outside the office, building and maintaining networks within communities of persons of concern (PoC). The development and maintenance of constructive relationships with PoC that measurably impact and enhance protection planning, programming and results, form the core of the work of the incumbent. S/he also supports the designing of a community-based protection strategy by ensuring that it is based on consultation with PoC. The other crucial role the incumbent will play include data management in the process of implementing functional and operational complaints and feedback mechanisms the agency has developed. For this, the incumbent will deal with a substantial amount of data collected from the persons of concern and support the community-based protection team to facilitate referral of cases and incidents identified in the field.

Task description

• Assist in operationalizing agency/unit-specific common data standards and promoting them with partners. • Assist in compiling and aggregating information elements required to produce standardized information products and implement data/information collection plans for baseline and context-specific data. • Support the operation in the analysis of processed data and information and perform data quality and consistency control. • Support the design, development, and participation in Needs Assessment processes, specifically in data collection, processing/collation, and data exploration. • Ensure community understanding of UNHCR's commitment to deliver on accountability and quality assurance in its response. Conduct information dissemination and awareness raising on the accountability to affected populations and the agency’s complaints and feedback mechanisms. • Sanitize and compile data on complaints and incidents collected through the complaints and feedback mechanisms and support the team to refer cases to relevant agencies and services providers. • Collect data for monitoring of programmes and budgets from an AGD perspective. Contribute to the unit project data management that will be updated regularly. • Draft and type routine correspondence, documents and reports and maintain up-to-date filing systems. • Through relationships with PoC and network of partners, stay abreast of political, social, economic and cultural developments that have an impact on the protection environment and provide advice to the protection team. Understand the perspectives, capacities, needs and resources of the PoC and advise the protection team, accordingly, highlighting the specific protection needs of women and men, children, youth and older persons, persons with disabilities, marginalized groups. • Support implementing and operational partners as well as displaced and local communities to develop community-owned activities to address, where applicable, the social, educational, psycho-social, cultural, health, organisational and livelihood concerns as well as child protection and prevention and response to SGBV. • Assist in working with host communities to involve national civil society groups in improving the protection of PoC. • Assist in the analysis that identifies the capacities of communities of concern and risks they face. • Support participatory assessments and ongoing consultation with PoC. • Support communities in establishing representation and coordination structures. • Act as an interpreter in exchange of routine information, contribute to related liaison activities and respond directly to routine queries. • Assist in the enforcement of participatory AGD sensitive analysis as an essential basis for all of UNHCR’s work. • Identify and recommend which individuals or groups to prioritize for counselling and field visits based on agreed criteria. • Enforce compliance of implementing partners with global protection policies and standards of professional integrity in the delivery of protection services. • Any other related tasks as may be required or assigned by the supervisor.