DAFI Anniversary Content Consultancy At UN High Commissioner for Refugees

UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, is offering a part-time home-based Individual Consultancy within the Education Section in the Division of Resilience and Solutions, Copenhagen.

UNHCR is a global organisation dedicated to saving lives, protecting rights and building a better future for refugees, forcibly displaced communities and stateless people. Every year, millions of men, women and children are forced to flee their homes to escape conflict and persecution. We are in over 125 countries, using our expertise to protect and care for millions.

Title: DAFI Anniversary Content Consultancy

Duty Station: home-based with mission travels

Duration: for 150 working days, starting as soon as possible until 31 December 2022

Contract Type: Individual Consultancy

Closing date: 06 February 2022

Start date: as soon as possible

Organisational context

This position will be responsible for delivering secondary and tertiary education content as well as content that speaks to refugee self-reliance, pledges and major partners, to support major events and reporting obligations in 2022. These include:

• 30th anniversary of the DAFI programme – Several core events are planned with partners. We will utilise the advent of the 30th anniversary to highlight and generate support across education programming. Relevant events during the year include: the World Higher Education Conference convened by UNESCO, the UN High Level Political Forum, a higher education and inclusion conference in Ecuador and a 30th anniversary culminating event in Berlin with the support of the German FFO. The final event will feature a large format photo exhibition of DAFI student profiles.

• Aiming Higher campaign – student profile content used to advance the campaign and as feature in donor reports. Having already generated over USD 7M, the campaign has the potential to continue to bring in significant funds for higher education, but also for other education levels and programmes. Content developed under this consultancy is used directly in the campaign, while remaining relevant for reporting and event content.

• 15by30 objective – using content generated by the consultant to highlight and illustrate: engagement across the 15by30 pillars, key refugee higher education stakeholders and partners including States, student engagement activities. Greater visibility on refugee education and higher education has brought two new State donors (Czech Republic and Denmark) and we intend to continue to appeal to additional State partners.

• Annual DAFI report – our sole reporting obligation requires a large number of high-quality images backed by in-depth interviews with each student. This content is frequently reused for other visibility purposes. The consultancy will also oversee the development of multi-media and student generated content to contribute to a more interactive DAFI report format in 2022.

To view occupational safety and health considerations for specific duty stations, please visit this link: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel

Duties and responsibilities

In line with UNHCR’s education strategy and the 15by30 roadmap, substantial scaling of tertiary education opportunities for refugees in the coming years remains a high priority. The DAFI programme remains the cornerstone of UNHCR’s tertiary education activities, and indeed, is the driving force for the 15by30 target and the global Aiming Higher campaign. 2022 will mark the 30th anniversary of the programme and UNHCR is planning, with the German Government and partners (BMZ, DAAD, WUSC, Governments of France and Portugal, etc), a series of events capitalising on the 30th anniversary and intended to boost advocacy, engagement and investments in refugee education and self-reliance overall.

Based on past experience, particularly the success of the Aiming Higher campaign (which has raised over USD 2 million in its first year), visual content highlighting individual students and their achievements is central to the messaging and success of the campaigns. There is a continued need for UNHCR to document and showcase outcomes of investment in tertiary education for refugees, including impacts on and evidence of international responsibility sharing and refugee self-reliance.

Building on the success of Aiming Higher and past global events such as “The Other One Percent-Higher Education in Forced Displacement” and the Global Refugee Forum, this consultancy will develop new content, materials and profiles for use in large scale public exhibitions (one of which at the Foreign Office in Berlin), increased outreach through social media, donor advocacy and other avenues, and inclusion in the annual education report, the annual DAFI programme report and other advocacy and informational materials as relevant.

Specific areas of focus of this consultancy:

• Contribute to the communications and visibility aspect of the 15by30 strategy by developing approaches to visualising and highlighting the five pillars of higher education for refugees, separately and how they relate to each other – DAFI, Connected Higher Education, TVET, complementary education pathways and national enrolment.

• Produce – and oversee the production of – media content in the form of student photos, personal stories, video profiles and compilations, social media content. Content will be generated during field missions to locations not recently or adequately highlighted in prior refugee higher education materials and in coordination with country and regional teams.

• Mount exhibitions at events throughout 2022.

• Develop a multi-media approach to the 2022 celebrations and campaigns including content for use online presence and advocacy.

Monitoring and Progress Controls (report requirements, periodicity, format, deadlines):

The final product (e.g. survey completed, data collected, workshop conducted, research documents produced specify):

1) Communication and visualization approach underpinning the 15by30 Roadmap (period 2021-2025), in the form of an action-oriented roadmap.

2) 15 stories of refuge students in tertiary and secondary education, specifically DAFI, connected learning, secondary and TVET students and DAFI alumni, developed on mission or coordinated remotely, and uploaded to refugees media (edited texts + photos and/or videos), with a focus on Covid impacts, contribution by students and/or underreported angles.

3) 20 additional stories of refugee students coordinated through country education focal points and PI colleagues to supplement above student profiles.

4) Coordination of production of a targeted information and advocacy-oriented video on the importance of higher education for refugees, examples of successes and ways to address challenges for use in online and public presentation platforms.

If it is to result in a written product specify:

Number of pages: TBC

Language(s): English

Number of copies: Electronic

Essential minimum qualifications and professional experience required

• Six years relevant working experience is required
• Demonstrated experience working with refugee youth required
• Undergraduate degree required, masters or professional qualification preferred

Location

The successful candidate will be working home-based with mission travels to different locations (to be confirmed).

Conditions

The consultancy is planned to be home-based.