EVALUATION OF UNHCR-LED INITIATIVES TO END STATELESSNESS – FINAL REPORT – VOLUME I Recommended actions 2 Invest in building the statelessness-related knowledge and skills of UNHCR staff and affiliates, including upskilling of Country Representatives’ knowledge about, and comfort in engaging on, aspects of statelessness, and ensure surge capacity mechanisms are available to fill temporary gaps. Once the new self-study e-learning course on statelessness is completed all protection staff, senior programme officers, public information officers, and resource mobilization staff should be strongly encouraged to complete it. It should also be shared with UN agency and other implementing and cooperating partners. Training on soft skills and advocacy related to statelessness should be made available to statelessness staff and public information officers. Regional Statelessness Officers, in consultation with the Statelessness Section, should systematically identify staff with lead responsibilities for statelessness that would benefit from participating in the external courses on statelessness that UNHCR has contributed to developing. Outside of training, the ongoing efforts of Regional Statelessness Officers to disseminate knowledge and facilitate events to showcase and discuss good practices should continue and be expanded, and funding allocated to intra-regional and global meetings to share learning and good practices. Other informal learning opportunities such as coaching, mentoring, on-the-job learning and communities of practice are fundamental and should be institutionalized. Special focus should be paid to building the skills and comfort level of Country Representatives, beginning with priority countries where statelessness is known or thought to be prevalent. Statelessness content should be incorporated within the existing training packages that Country Representatives receive. At the same time, more tailored briefings and cross-regional knowledge sharing events for Representatives should also be considered, as well as integration of statelessness into other broader learning events and meetings. Given the importance of national staff in tackling statelessness, it is essential that learning opportunities are translated and provided for non-English speaking staff members. Indicators should be established to monitor the impact of efforts to increase learning on statelessness so that areas for further development can be identified. Regional protection officers should collaborate on creating a renewed, decentralized surge capacity system that meets temporary essential staffing needs. 3 Enhance organizational capacity and tools for public advocacy on statelessness, including dedicated communications staff at headquarters, Regional Bureau, and in priority countries. Prioritize public advocacy and building public awareness in operational contexts where it can influence changes in policy and practice. Despite persistently low levels of awareness and understanding of statelessness among the public and some government officials, UNHCR has assembled a relatively deep set of good stories about the causes and consequences of statelessness. The gap in communications staffing for the campaign needs to be remedied to better support global and field efforts to build public awareness. Ensuring that reliable estimates of the scale of stateless populations of concern, and qualitative information on their situation is available in countries that have not engaged in building public awareness and other work on statelessness is important to support all forms of advocacy. The organization has experience facilitating public advocacy through the use of major events, goodwill ambassadors, special publications, and social media, though the application of these capacities to the statelessness mandate has been sporadic or has not been documented. The recommendations of the 2016 internal campaign assessment should be followed up in order to provide better guidance and tools to the field so they are able to tailor the messages of the campaign to their context, while receiving overarching support from global social media and other communications efforts. Advocacy goals should be set at regional level to enable context-specific communications and advocacy work to be undertaken. Case studies have shown good initiatives taken by some country operations to engage the media and influencers on specific public advocacy efforts. These experiences should be studied, and lessons disseminated to field operations. The voices of stateless people should be front and center in these efforts, and for operations where UNHCR staff feel they do not understand the lived experiences of stateless persons UNHCR should 54 Responsible Global Learning and Development Centre with support of DIP, and RB protection pillars DER with DIP / Statelessness Section and RB External Relations units UNHCR / May, 2021