Guidelines, tools and minimum standards on starting and managing the Refugee Outreach Volunteer
UNHCR Lebanon
Highlights
Refugees live in over 1,700 different locations in Lebanon. This makes information dissemination and outreach vital to them. With the large-scale and dispersed nature of the refugee population, UNHCR Lebanon is turning to refugees to play a greater role in protection monitoring and response. The role of Refugee Outreach Volunteers (ROV) is to provide insight into their communities’ capacities and protection priorities/solutions, to assist in the identification of persons at risk, to disseminate information about services and programmes to their communities, and to contribute to the assessment, design, monitoring and evaluation of humanitarian assistance programmes. This mobilization activity has long been considered an operational priority. In Lebanon, the refugee outreach volunteers’ initiative started with the Iraqi operation in 2009 and it proved to be a success in providing community based protection response. In May 2011, with the rising of the Syrian refugee crisis, staff from the Ministry of Social affairs’ staff were mobilized and trained to conduct outreach activities to Syrian refugees up until the creation of the refugee outreach volunteers’ initiative in June 2012, in the North (Tripoli).
