Quarter 2 Report: October 1, 2016 - December 31, 2016

The project is a global initiative with a focus on West/Central Africa and Iraq, with the goal of informing longer-term humanitarian response targeting internally displaced persons (IDPs). The project is funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) through the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) with a grant amount of $300,000. The project targets 250 practitioners across 25 organizations and 9 cluster coordination bodies, with the objective of improving humanitarian capacity to keep adolescent girls safe. The project focuses on protection coordination, advocacy, and information, with a specific emphasis on training operational humanitarian organizations and stakeholders to improve their reach, inclusion, and program design. The project has made significant progress in the second quarter of 2016, with the Women's Refugee Commission presenting the latest guidance at a Girls in Emergencies Collaborative Regional Training in Amman, Jordan. The training convened 15 practitioners from October 16-18, 2016, and included key technical representatives from various humanitarian agencies. The commission has also facilitated a training on I'm Here implementation for UNICEF Lebanon and its implementing partners, with the aim of building partners' capacities to identify, engage, and build programs that are inclusive of the most vulnerable sub-populations of adolescent girls. The project has achieved key indicators ahead of schedule, with 17 people trained in protection, disaggregated by sex, and 1 organization in a new or protracted crisis designing new or modifying existing programs focused on keeping adolescent girls safe. The project has also held 2 briefings with global and field-based clusters, and ProCap and GenCap Advisors, and has disseminated revised guidance and toolkit to practitioners. The project has also experienced some challenges, including the need to strategically postpone engagement with core cluster bodies at the global level due to the development of the I'm Here real-time monitoring tool and dashboard. However, the project is expected to make significant progress in the third and fourth quarters of 2016, with the launch of the real-time monitoring tool and analytics dashboard, and the briefing of country offices about additional details. The project has also received interest from the World Food Programme (WFP) MENA Office to identify opportunities for infusing I'm Here guidance, and has been approached by UN OCHA colleagues to brief country offices about additional details. The project is expected to continue making progress in the coming quarters, with a focus on improving humanitarian capacity to keep adolescent girls safe from the start.