Additional Information
Deadline for Applications
June 20, 2026
Grade
NOB
Staff Member / Affiliate Type
National Professional Officer
Reason
Temporary > Temporary Assignment/ Appointment
Hardship Level
B
Family Type
Family
Residential location (if applicable)
Target Start Date
2026-07-01
Target End Date
2026-12-31
Standard Job Description
Associate Economist
Organizational Setting and Work Relationships
Framed by the Global Compact for Refugees (GCR) and UNHCR's mission to find solutions to refugee situations, strengthened cooperation with development and private sector partners is essential. The increasing number of refugees and internally displaced persons in protracted displacement situations, together with the increasing scale of irregular migration, large-scale refugee movements, and costs of responding to humanitarian situations, have placed forced displacement high on the global agenda. These elements have further driven the realization that humanitarian support must be complemented by development and private sector actors to lift displaced populations out of poverty, enable solutions, and encourage an area based approach to poverty reduction.
Within UNHCR, the Division of Resilience and Solutions (DRS) was formed to address these challenges, in part by broadening strategic partnerships with key actors in these areas, including importantly the World Bank and other multilateral development banks and in so doing aligning approaches by Government. To support investments by development actors in area based approaches including both forcibly displaced and their hosts, requires better data and standardized information about refugees and host community households, particularly in relation to their socio-economic status or multidimensional poverty status. Accurate data on welfare conditions is also needed for UNHCR and partner operations, including cash, livelihoods, and education programming, welfare targeting and monitoring of the Sustainable Development Goals. Finally, comparable information for both refugees and host community members is a pre-requisite for measuring changes in welfare required to inform medium-term programming with development partners and national governments. DRS together with the World Bank Poverty Global Practice supported by the UNHCR World Bank Joint Data Center manage the partnership and play the global coordination role for the institution in working with National Statistics Offices to include forcibly displaced into National Poverty Assessments.
The Associate Economist will contribute to the Global Compact for Refugees (GCR) objectives: 1 - Ease the pressures on host countries and 2 - Enhance refugee self-reliance. Concretely, the incumbent will contribute to the indicators measuring the success of the GCR and particularly the proportion of refugees living below the national poverty line in the host country. Depending on where s/he is based, the reporting lines will differ. If the Associate Economist is based in Headquarters, s/he will report to the DRS Partnership Analytics Research and Knowledge (PARK) section. If s/he is based in a country or regional office, will report to either the Representative or Deputy Representative (Programme), or in some cases Head of Sub-Office or Senior Operations Officer. In all cases, there will be a dotted line to DRS PARK for technical functional clearance of candidates and for technical oversight of economics products. The Associate Economist will work closely with Programme and Protection colleagues in addition to Senior Management in the operation as well as Bureaux and technical unit key, external stakeholders and development agencies, including the World Bank, government agencies, national statistical agencies, and other operational partners.
All UNHCR staff members are accountable to perform their duties as reflected in their job description. They do so within their delegated authorities, in line with the regulatory framework of UNHCR which includes the UN Charter, UN Staff Regulations and Rules, UNHCR Policies and Administrative Instructions as well as relevant accountability frameworks. In addition, staff members are required to discharge their responsibilities in a manner consistent with the core, functional, cross-functional and managerial competencies and UNHCR's core values of professionalism, integrity and respect for diversity.
Unhcr · Abidjan, Côte D'ivoire