EVALUATION OF UNHCR-LED INITIATIVES TO END STATELESSNESS – FINAL REPORT – VOLUME I Planning and budgeting Finding 18: Strategically directed seed funding, such as from the Seeds for Solutions initiative, can have a positive effect on scaling up UNHCR’s work on statelessness in operations. Efforts to guide operations towards addressing GAP actions relevant in their country through the GSIP are commendable but have not always translated into inclusion of statelessness activities in operations’ plans and budgets. 175. Some country operations have received financial support from UNHCR HQ to encourage development of their statelessness work, in particular through the ‘Seeds for Solutions’ initiative which promoted innovation, and provided small amounts of funding to 19 country operations in 2015. No records were located for the overall Seeds for Solutions initiative beyond brief references in an UNHCR annual report. Case study countries that received funding from the initiative credited it with providing a catalyst to scale up statelessness work, providing important initial investments that paid for dedicated staff to work on identification and registration drives, capacity development and training for partners and government counterparts, advocacy efforts to reduce birth registration fees, and legal commentary. HQ key informants believed that the Seeds for Solutions awards made a big difference in increasing operations’ attention to statelessness, including by demonstrating the value of investing in dedicated statelessness staff positions. Since the funding from the Seeds for Solutions initiative ended, no other dedicated pool of funding for strategic investments in scaling up statelessness work has been available. Some of the limited earmarked funding has served a similar purpose, such as the German government’s contributions to support initiatives in Kenya, which helped secure pledges at the HLS. 176. To help operationalize work on GAP actions the GSIP identifies UNHCR activities aligned to the 10 GAP actions for target countries. The GSIP is country-oriented, but it is descriptive and not directly linked to the Results Framework and RBM system. According to the “Guidance on Operational Activities to Address Statelessness”, the GSIP is intended to be consulted by UNHCR offices when developing their operating plans for specific goals and activities deemed most important for countries based on their progress and achievements in each of the GAP actions. This guidance further explains the types of stakeholders that should be consulted and provides more detailed information on the activities operations should consider implementing for each of the GAP actions, depending on an assessment of the statelessness population and issues in a context. 177. In 2016, the Statelessness Section and then DPSM jointly issued “Guidance relating to programming statelessness in the Operations Plans”96. It provides information on how to plan for implementation of the GAP through UNHCR’s Results Framework. This guidance states that all operations that plan to “undertake significant statelessness activities must create a Pillar 2 in their operations plans” to ensure adequate accountability and reporting.97 The document goes on to map, for each of the 10 GAP actions, the statelessness specific problem, related GAP action, rights groups and objectives in the Results Framework, impact indicators relevant to the action, intended solutions and related resources to consult. Trainings on this guidance were conducted in 2016 and 2017. 178. Key informants offered mixed views on the extent to which country operations regularly consult the GSIP and planning guidance in the development of their plans and budgets and how relevant and useful these offices feel the guidance is. Most of what is contained in the GSIP is derived from operations’ inputs. 179. A few key informants noted that funding can be shifted between different pillar budgets. In one interview it was noted that statelessness budget requests that were not approved at the beginning of a planning year can sometimes receive sudden funding from unspent Pillar 1 budgets towards the end of the year, at which point it is difficult to fully programme these funds as intended. Others noted that when COPs fail to adequately articulate statelessness activities it undermines the ability to properly budget for such work. Resource mobilization for UNHCR statelessness work Finding 19: UNHCR resource mobilization efforts have not substantially increased the availability of funding for statelessness. Earmarked contributions for Pillar 2 were limited and a singular appeal for the #IBelong Campaign was unsuccessful, leaving statelessness funding dependent on management to allocate flexible resources. 96 97 UNHCR, Guidance relating to programming statelessness in the Operations Plans, Additional Guidance for Planning: 2016-2017. The guidance states that all operations should create a Pillar 2 in their plans if they have an Operating Level OPS budget for statelessness exceeding USD 50,000 and / or a significant amount of staff time dedicated to statelessness activities. UNHCR / May, 2021 49