UN Youth Volunteer in Community Based Protection

UNHCR's primary purpose is to safeguard the rights and well-being of refugees. In its efforts to achieve this objective, UNHCR strives to ensure that everyone can exercise the right to seek asylum and find safe refuge in another State, and to return home voluntarily.

The DRC operation is a complex operation with more than 6.4 million internally displaced people and more than 525,000 refugees. As part of the implementation of UNHCR's 2020-2025 protection strategy in the DRC, Community-Based protection is at the heart of the response to the protection challenges of forcibly displaced persons. Community-Based protection works on strengthening collaboration with communities and to make protection interventions sustainable with the communities themselves as the main actors. Community-Based protection interventions consider issues of child protection, accountability, complaint and feedback mechanisms, community participation, gender equality, diversity, disability. In a word, the implementation of the policies on age, gender and diversity and the policy on child protection and others.
To enable the operation to strengthen the coordination of Community-Based protection, it is essential to have a voluntary to contribute of the coordination of this activity and give technical support to national staffs and all sectors and provide guidance for the effectiveness of the implementation of Community-Based protection approach.
S/he maintains close working relationships and supports Protection and Community-Based Protection staff in the field, who act as the critical interface between UNHCR and communities of concern, enabling them to provide the AGD-sensitive analysis of community risks and capacities that form the essential foundations of national and regional programmes. The incumbent contributes to maintains close working relations with sister UN entities, governmental entities, non-governmental organisations and academic institutions that can contribute to enhancing protection and achieving solutions through people centred, Community-Based and gender responsive approaches.
The incumbent contributes to provide guidance to country operations to strengthen their coordination and advocacy on Community-Based approaches to protection with governments, partners and other key stakeholders.

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.

Under the direct supervision of GBV Officer, the UN Youth Volunteer will undertake the following tasks:
• Provide support to map protection community based structures in the areas of the population of concern (PoC) and support to develop strong links with a cross-section of members of refugee/IDP/stateless communities, using an AGD approach.
• Through relationships with PoC and network of partners, provide support to continuous update of the socio-political, economic and cultural development trends that have an impact on the protection environment and provide advice to senior management.
• Support to collect data on capacities, needs and resources of the PoC to inform the protection strategy, planning processes and operations plan with special attention to the specific protection needs of women, children, youth and older persons, persons with disabilities, minority groups and persons living with HIV/AIDS.
• Provide support to consultative process with government counterparts at local levels, partners and PoC to develop and implement integrated strategies that address the key protection priorities, including for vulnerable groups such as children, women
• Contribute to provide technical guidance and support to UNHCR and partners and im-plement and oversee Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) on all Community-Based protection related issues.
• Contribute to support the design, implementation and evaluation of protection centred and solutions-oriented programming with implementing and operational partners guar-anteeing that community-owned activities are integrated.
• Support regular field missions for protection assessment, and make direct contact with PoC, host communities, local authorities and partners.
• Provide support to the functioning of the humanitarian protection cluster led by UN-HCR and any other sub working groups such as Gender based violence group
• Contribute to the development of an Age Gender Diversity-compliant strategy on which the response of the Protection Cluster is grounded in and covers all assessed and pri-oritized protection needs of the affected populations.
• Contribute to the Protection team's information management component which: pro-vides disaggregated data on PoC and their key needs; research, collects and dissemi-nate relevant protection information and good practices to enhance protection delivery and provide technical advice if necessary.
• Contribute to support the inclusion of participatory, Community-Based protection and Age Gender and Diversity approaches in strategies and plans within the Area of Re-sponsibility (AoR).
• Contribute to support community understanding of UNHCR's commitment to deliver on accountability and quality assurance in its response.
• Assist PoC to develop structures that enhance their participation on all protection net-working at local level.
• Contribute to the design of the Community-Based protection strategy, project submis-sions and budgets for endorsement by the supervisor.