Consortium of Community Protection, Legal and HLP Assistance to Conflict Affected Iraqis in Salah al-Din and Kirkuk A consortium of one local NGO, Justice Center, and two INGOs, Oxfam and IRC, will target Kirkuk and Salah al-Din with Justice Center leading on legal assistance, representation, awareness raising, counseling and coordination of the judicial system. Assistance will be integrated into Oxfam’s community-based protection activities, including community groups, cash for protection, integrated referral systems, and capacity building of local NGOs in protection and community-based protection approaches. 

The project targets community groups to improve identifying, responding and advocating for their protection needs. This will be done through building the communities’ self-protection capacity, facilitating safe and timely access to emergency and protection services and cash for protection as practical live-saving humanitarian assistance to support vulnerable groups to reduce, mitigate or respond to protection risks.

Community-based activities will contribute to the process of strengthening community structures that will provide minimum services including referrals link to address gender and protection risks for women, men, girls and boys. The project will further strengthen the capacity of the local actors, particularly those working with women and children to mainstream protection, gender and GBV prevention in humanitarian interventions and to provide appropriate response measures.

As consortium lead, IRC will directly implement housing, land, and property (HLP) and legal assistance activities in Kirkuk and coordinate the consortium’s integrated programming by ensuring collaborative approaches, planning, capacity building and mentorship and will lead on building the operational capacity of the local NGO partner. IRC will also provide legal mentorship of the local NGO partners implementing their legal activities and provide an MampE support system to ensure accountability to our beneficiaries and quality legal assistance.

A key component of this project is to both support conflict-affected Iraqis claim their legal rights and strengthen community protection within at risk and vulnerable communities, whilst also strengthening local NGO operational and technical capacity so as to transition into a national based approach to the emergency and impending early recovery and development phase of post-conflict Iraq.

The focus on legal assistance will be integrated into the referral systems of community-based protection, awareness raising across the consortium partners, and legal systems strengthening through the roundtables and events. Legal teams will also be able to make direct referrals from the service mapping provided, have a protection lens in their approach and assistance, and build trust and rapport within the affected communities. Justice Center’s capacity will be carefully managed by providing a full-time legal Team Leader in Salah al-Din and capacity building trainings from both Oxfam and IRC for JC. A shared learning approach will be applied with case conferences made and technical support from IRC available and proactively following up on JC cases and impact. A consortium coordinator will monitor JC’s work, monitoring and accountability and run a consortium opening, conduct monthly visits to JC office, and run quarterly lessons learned, and facilitate the relationship between Oxfam, IRC and JC.