For the past three months, I have been interning with the Global Child Protection Area of Responsibility (CP AoR) led by UNICEF in Geneva, Switzerland. I began my work remotely while I was in the U.S. finishing up my spring semester at Syracuse and had the opportunity to join the team full-time in Geneva at the start of May.
Although I have only been here a few weeks now, I have been able to meet with my colleagues, spend a few days in working in the office and have been tasked with substantially more responsibility. I am working on two main projects right now beyond my day-today duties.
The first is helping to create a Field Cooperation Framework to increase collaboration between Child Protection field coordinators across different regions of the world. To better understand the work that needs to be done to increase collaboration across regional contexts, I have helped organize and manage online consultations with staff around the word. The Framework is expected to be completed by the end of September.
The second main opportunity I have been able to help with is creating and disseminating a survey to measure youth perceptions of climate-related disasters in South East Asia. This has been my favorite task so far, as it directly relates with my personal interests and passions. The survey was translated into 12 different languages, which I was able to act as the lead organizer for, and just went live last week. I am looking forward to help analyze the results of the survey in June.
Overall, I am elated to be in Geneva working for an organization I am so invested in. I have high hopes that the remainder of the internship will go as well as the first half has, and I am grateful to Syracuse for assisting me in this opportunity. I highly recommend this internship to anyone interested in emergency humanitarian assistance specifically focused on child protection.
Jill Watkins is an MAIR student who will graduate in December. She is currently interning at the Partnership for Public Service in Washington, DC.