Digital Access, Inclusion and Participation: Call for Proposals

About the Call for Proposals

UNHCR Innovation Service is happy to announce a Call for Proposals that provides targeted financial support to country operations interested in tackling specific challenges relating to Digital Access, Inclusion and Participation. These challenges have emerged from the previous rounds of funds, operational experience across the organisation and research undertaken within the programme. Furthermore the impact of COVID-19 requires UNHCR to develop more creative and inclusive approaches to digital access and participation, as operations rely on remote channels to provide services in light of social distancing measures. This adapted approach gives space and resources to support UNHCR teams address key issues they may be facing in light of COVID-19.

Challenges will be issued on a rolling basis on different thematics. Only UNHCR country operations are eligible to submit Expressions of Interest to open challenges. Each challenge will have its own specific Background Note, evaluation criteria, and application process.

The financial and technical support included within each Call is generously provided by The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and managed by the Innovation Service. Successful applicants to any Call for Proposals are able to draw down on this fund in financial year 2020 – spending against the Innovation Service’s cost centre, per the details and timeline in each call.

About the Digital Access, Inclusion and Participation Programme

This programme aims to enhance UNHCR’s approaches to ensuring refugees have access to digital technology and connectivity, and that when UNHCR is engaging with communities through such channels we do so in a way that is accountable to them, accessible to different groups, and facilitates meaningful participation in humanitarian action. Through this programme a broad spectrum of challenges and thematics have been identified – whether through operational interventions to date or novel research – that warrant further exploration through field testing and learning. The purpose of this call for proposals is to provide space for such exploration, at the same time providing opportunities for country operations to make progress along identified priority areas. The precise dynamics of the individual challenges within the Call for Proposals may differ but all come together to help UNHCR improve its understanding of how the agency can contribute to enhancing refugees’ digital access and participation, and undertake effective & creative humanitarian programming in this space with accountability and inclusion as core driving values.

General Principles

While each Call will have different criteria, some general principles, based on the values of the Service, will apply to all:

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 trialling something new or different
Initiatives should 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.

What we’re not able to support:

Repeat funding for ongoing connectivity initiatives (unless these are being significantly iterated/adapted due to learning and fulfill the criteria above);
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 propose ‘tried and tested’ approaches or vanilla application of existing methodologies;
Initiatives which don’t leverage multi-stakeholder capacities nor significantly engage PoCs in design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation.

Active Challenges

The Innovation Service is working closely with UNHCR Divisions and Bureaux in the development of challenges and specific teams outside the Innovation Service will be involved in evaluating Expressions of Interest, which will take place every 6 weeks. Similarly, new calls may become available as specific challenges on Digital Access Inclusion are defined and prioritised. The following calls are currently active.

Community-led Networks to enhance last-mile connectivity

Can local community owned connectivity infrastructure be a suitable solution for sustainable provision of connectivity services in rural areas?

Community Based Approach that enhances self-reliance
Requires an enabling regulatory framework and supportive authorities
As a potential solution when markets aren’t addressing key connectivity needs