Chevening Leadership and Influence Essay Example: Refugee livelihoods referral coordinator

When I noticed displaced people being referred to livelihood placements without any structured check on protection risks, I drafted a pre-placement screening proposal and asked my supervisor for space to pilot it with our three main implementing partners. Coordination was the hard part. Protection officers worried about sharing case-sensitive information; employers wanted faster placements. Community representatives, whose trust I had built through regular follow-up, told me that at least 12 beneficiaries had quietly withdrawn in the previous quarter because they felt unsafe but had not raised it formally. I used that evidence to reframe the conversation: the screening was not a procedural hurdle but a way to reduce dropout. I facilitated a joint session where each group named its concern without it becoming a dispute, and we agreed on a short checklist that protection staff would complete before any referral was confirmed. Within two months, my team and two partner agencies were using it. Across the next six months, 47 placements went through the checklist, and unreported withdrawals dropped by roughly 40 percent against the same case categories from the prior period, based on the protection logbook I compared. My supervisor cited the change in our quarterly review and asked me to write it up for new-staff onboarding; the checklist is now part of our standard referral pathway. One community representative said beneficiaries were raising concerns earlier instead of disappearing. I learned that beneficiary evidence moves resistant stakeholders faster than procedure. I want to study monitoring and evaluation in applied social protection in the UK, then bring a revised checklist and indicator set to our inter-agency livelihoods working group, asking them to test it across two more field offices and review withdrawal and safety indicators after one cycle.