Jennifer Headshot

Jennifer Roberts

Senior Education Officer, Emergencies - UNHCR

Jennifer Roberts is a Senior Education Officer, focusing on emergency contexts and situations of sudden mass displacement, with UNHCR’s headquarters-based Education Section.  Jennifer has worked with various UN agencies, including UNESCO and UNRWA, on refugee education.  She began her career in South Africa focused on education policy and efforts to improve schooling following the transition to democracy. Later Jennifer specialised in the monitoring and evaluation of education programmes aimed at improving education quality and in assessing changes in learner achievement. Before joining the United Nations, she worked with several NGOs and provided consultancy services to the Ministry of Education and donors to education, working on projects in a range of conflict-affected and post-conflict settings that included Afghanistan, Angola and Mocambique. She has been with UNHCR for eight years, with several of those spent in Turkey. Jennifer has participates in a number of EIE-related fora, including the Geneva Global Hub for EIE and the Initiative to Strengthen Education in Emergencies Coordination.  Jennifer holds a Masters in Education Policy from the University of the Witwatersrand and post- and undergraduate degrees in Linguistics and language teaching, and Law from Rhodes University (South Africa).