Deadline: 13-May-22
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Innovation Service is happy to announce the continuation of its Digital Inclusion Call for Proposals that provides targeted financial support and guidance to UNHCR country operations for 2022.
UNHCR’s Digital Inclusion programme aims to ensure that refugees and the communities that host them have the right, and the choice, to be included in a connected society, and can have their voices heard in the design and implementation of humanitarian response. This programme is led by UNHCR’s Innovation Service and utilizes innovative approaches, tools and methodologies to achieve its goals – encouraging community-centric creative approaches that address identified challenges.
The programme is delivered by the UNHCR Innovation Service to pursue experimental and forward-thinking approaches to the topic of digital inclusion, something that will impact the future work of UNHCR across its different work areas. It will be a sandbox for testing new operational activities that support persons of concern to UNHCR to exercise their rights to be part of a connected society. It provides space to develop creative solutions to engage with refugees and promote their participation in programming. It also seeks to strengthen community self-reliance by exploring opportunities for communities to engage in the digital economy and pursue safe and fair digitally-enabled livelihoods.
The programme works as a supporting function to UNHCR operations and aims to enhance their field experimentation and delivery through a four-pillar approach that covers Research and Advocacy, Capacity Building, Field and Operational Support, and Partnerships & Coordination.
Objectives
The objectives of this fund are to:
- Deliver meaningful and innovative digital inclusion projects designed by communities for communities.
- Build an ever growing evidence-base and continually test assumptions around what does and doesn’t work for country-level Digital Inclusion initiatives.
- Fairly allocate Innovation Service resources to UNHCR country teams for Innovative Digital Inclusion projects.
- Support and encourage UNHCR operations to explore emerging and innovative dimensions of digital inclusion and, where fruitful, incorporate into longer-term programming and operational planning.
- Provide pathways to scale or replication for promising digital inclusion initiatives.
Focus Areas
There are some areas which they might prioritize.
- Community-led connectivity solutions.
- Enabling safe access to digital spaces.
- Breaking down the Digital Gender Divide.
- Digital Leisure.
- Digital and the Environment.
- Digital inclusion of people with disabilities.
- Community-led online misinformation and rumor management.
- Community-based social media influencers.
- Digital livelihoods.
- Digital Skills.
- Digital inclusion for older persons.
Funding Information
This will depend on the specific project idea but generally they’re unable to provide more than USD 50,000 to ensure that a number of different country operations can benefit from the available support.
Principles: What they are looking for:
- Initiatives that demonstrate active and meaningful participation of Persons of Concern (PoCs) in the problem definition, identification of needs, design process and planned engagement in implementation, monitoring, iteration and documentation.
- An initiative that builds and/or strengthens multi-stakeholder partnerships by leveraging different expertise and capacities across these partnerships (these can range from formalized partnerships through to ad hoc working/advisory groups).
- Initiatives that seek to address sustainability challenges which often result from short-term solutions and/or lack of local ownership.
- Initiatives which – in line with the Global Compact on Refugees – promote self-reliance.
- An initiative that has inbuilt mechanisms to enable iteration, learning, including from failures, feedback from communities and documentation.
- An initiative that demonstrates willingness to engage in organizational knowledge sharing.
- An initiative that demonstrates how its approach or solution is building on lessons learned from previous experiences and trialing something new or different.
- An initiative that applies ‘Do No Harm’ principles and promotes safe engagement in digital ecosystems, free of digital risks.
What they’re Not Able to Support:
- Repeat funding for ongoing digital inclusion initiatives.
- Initiatives that seek to implement tried and tested solutions, for example connected community centres (unless these are significantly adapted to new contexts/operational environments).
- Initiatives which don’t leverage multi-stakeholder capacities nor significantly engage PoCs in design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation.
- Initiatives that ends in a one-off project or that lacks a sense of ownership from the communities.
Eligibility Criteria
- If you work for a UNHCR country operation and have support from senior management, then yes! If not, they’d still be interested in hearing from you and the work you’re doing.
- For interested parties outside of UNHCR, they’d recommend engaging with the UNHCR country team in country of relevance and exploring the possibilities of partnership.
For more information, visit https://www.unhcr.org/innovation/digital-inclusion-call/