The UNHCR Regional Bureau is accredited to ECOWAS and ECCAS and works in close coordination with UN regional entities. The region includes both English- and French-speaking countries, requiring strong bilingual communication skills.
The WCA region is home to about 21 million forcibly displaced and stateless persons, with DRC, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, and Chad hosting the largest populations, primarily displaced by conflict, intercommunal violence, and persecution, and other severe human rights violations. Humanitarian needs continue to grow due to expanding insecurity in the Sahel, mixed migration movements, and political shifts in several countries. Additionally, the Sudan crisis has led to significant refugee flows into Chad and the Central African Republic. While there have been some small-scale returns, displacement trends are expected to persist through 2025 and 2026 ; all this in a global complex operational and geopolitical landscape, including emerging trends in the Sahel, changes in the humanitarian landscape, with unique regional dynamics.
Responsibilities :
The Assistant Government Liaison Officer is usually located in respectively Abuja, Nigeria the Headquarters for ECOWAS and Libreville, Gabon the Headquarters for ECCAS. S/he plays a crucial support role in ensuring UNHCR’s approach and collaborative work with ECOWAS and ECCAS to ensure the consistent, strategic and coherent objectives of the partnership are achieved. The Assistant Government Liaison Officer will support UNHCR’s collaborative work with the technical counterparts in ECOWAS to advance the activities/workplan with the ECOWAS Directorate for Humanitarian Affairs, ECOWAS Parliament and ECOWAS Community Court of Justice. In parallel, S/he will also work collaboratively with technical counterparts in ECCAS Commission to the achieve the objectives of UNHCR’s partnership with the ECCAS Commission. Typically, this technical work involves joint coordination arrangements, partnership with various entities to advance the objectives of the aforementioned partnerships as pertains to UNHCR’s protection and solutions mandate. The main aim is to assist senior management to ensure that UNHCR and the Regional Economic Communities of ECOWAS and ECCAS will work together jointly to achieve the objectives in line with UNHCR’s work on protection and solutions for refugees and the forcibly displaced. These joint work between UNHCR and the Regional Economic Communities of ECOWAS and ECCAS should be done in line with UNHCR’s Mandate, the Global Compact for Refugees, the IDP policy, and agreed inter-agency commitments. More specifically, s/he advises the senior management on issues and processes concerning the relationship with ECOWAS and ECOWAS and related positioning, coordination, advocacy, information, resource allocation, fundraising, reporting, and communication with other UN agencies, NGOs, civil society actors, private sector, media and other relevant actors through strong engagement in humanitarian inter-agency processes, but also with a focus on development processes as they impact on UNHCR. The overall goal of the position is to support the effectiveness of UNHCR’s leadership roles and responses to situations affecting people of concern to UNHCR (refugees, asylum-seekers, IDPs, stateless persons, returnees, host communities) through an open and transparent partnership approach with the technical counterparts within ECOWAS and ECCAS.
The Assistant Government Liaison Officer ensures that support is provided for specific activities related to UNHCR’s workplan with specific entities of ECOWAS and ECCAS mentioned above. The Assistant Government Liaison Officer will support the supervisor with all planning, policy and reporting activities. The incumbent will support the supervisor in maintaining a constant dialogue with the Regional Economic Communities (RECs) of ECOWAS and ECCAS on the overall protection context in the region and activities in line with the workplans of the respective ECOWAS and ECCAS entities. A key tool in this regard will be the facilitation and support of periodic meetings with the RECs as well as to support the broadening of mutual information through meeting reports, situation updates, organizing joint workshops and development of policy(ies) in coordination with the technical colleagues at the Regional Bureau and at the country level.
Qualifications and Experience :
a. Education (Level and area of required and/or preferred education)
Law/International Law;
Political Science;
Social Science;
Business Administration;
or other relevant field.
Work Experience :
1-year relevant experience with Undergraduate degree; or no experience with Graduate degree; or no experience with Doctorate degree
Skills :
MS-Drafting, Documentation, Data Presentation; Preparation of workshops and conference documents.
MG-Negotiation;
CL-Multi-stakeholder Communications with Partners, Government & Community
