has not been provided, the GCENR has been able to continue some activities through an existing grant to
the WRC that ended in March 2021. Since the 2014 establishment of the GCENR with funding from PRM,
WRC sought to diversify funding and has also benefited from in-kind support from UNHCR and the Open
Society Foundation (OSF) for country and regional-level workshops. Overall, informants found the
GCENR to be effective in raising awareness of gender discrimination in nationality laws.
UNHCR Statelessness Staffing at Headquarters and the Role of Regionalization. As highlighted in the
graphic below,8 the Statelessness Section sits in UNHCR’s Division of International Protection (DIP) and
is headed by a statelessness expert who works along with a small staff based in Geneva. The graphic
provides an approximation of the staffing grades of selected UNHCR international staff working on
statelessness, which range from the P2 introductory grade to the high-level, D2 (director) grade. The graphic
highlights the relative lack of clout of the Statelessness Section within the agency. Under regionalization,
country-level protection staff report to the Regional Bureaus, while the Statelessness Section remains in
Geneva and serves only an advisory role. Within UNHCR, a Section has less clout than a Division or a
Service, making it hard for statelessness to get the attention it needs within an agency that is full of
competing priorities.
The Statelessness Section works closely with the Division of External Relations, which has supported the
communications aspects of the #IBelong Campaign. Support for the communications side of the campaign
has not been consistent, as staff were hired in the outset of the campaign for a temporary period, followed
by a gap for a few years, and finally in 2019 a dedicated Communications Officer was hired to work on the
#IBelong Campaign full time. In 2018, a Special Advisor on Statelessness was appointed to prepare for,
run and conduct initial follow-ups to the HLS at the 2019 Executive Committee meeting, but that Advisor
has since departed.
The Statelessness Section regularly engages the Donor Relations and Resource Mobilization Service, which
funds the position of the Campaign Communications Manager out of its regular budget. The Statelessness
Section also engages with the Global Data Service on statelessness statistics, the Division of Resilience and
Solutions on livelihoods and economic inclusion, and the Division of Strategic Planning and Results on
monitoring and planning of statelessness activities. Apart from the Global Data Service, this evaluation was
not able to gather much feedback on the effectiveness of these engagements between the Statelessness
Section and these Divisions and Services.
8 This graphic is provided as a general, simplified guide to the parts of UNHCR's staffing structure that deal directly with
statelessness. It is not an accurate representation of all UNHCR staffing.
6