RILx23 Perspectives: Reflections on Humanitarian Innovation - Navigating New Frontiers, Partnerships, and Impact

Dear humanitarian innovators and innovative humanitarians,

I hope that this blog post finds many of you enjoying a well-earned vacation.  Leaving your day to day surroundings has a way to elicit some fresh thinking and gain some perspective on things, no?  In my case, the change of perspective is quite literal: I left my home in the flatlands or Northern France to stay at a village 2000m high in the Alps.  Over the course of a day, the world switched from 2D to 3D and the horizon became less of a constant and more of a concept.

That feeling is reminiscent of the mindshift I experienced during our RILx23 event in Nairobi. Spending a week with our amazing Response Lab and Affiliate Facilities team as well as with dozens of incredible individuals from all over the humanitarian and innovation worlds made it possible to think beyond the day to day struggles of supporting a complex network, scrambling for funding and improving our set of tools and guidance.  We managed to sum up the group findings through a list of Ten Key Takeaways which will prove exceedingly helpful in developing RIL’s new strategy for 2024-2028. With a few weeks of reflection behind and a whole new landscape in front of me some follow-up thoughts have materialized (and I hope they don’t have more to do with the low-oxygen atmosphere at this altitude). 

Mostly, these thoughts have to do with the risk of losing sight of why innovation matters in the humanitarian space.  We innovate because we want to generate better impact to people who need help, not because we want to try new things or change a system.  In that light, generating results at scale takes primacy over supporting local innovators, building ecosystems, improving humanitarian partnerships and localizing the innovation process. I strongly believe that these and other such initiatives will each play key roles in helping worthwhile solutions emerge and scale faster but we need to be careful about going all-in with any one of them – this far into my own humanitarian innovation journey, it is becoming clear to me that there is not one single type of investment or approach that will lead to more transformative results benefiting entire populations.  

Take RILx23’s overarching theme, New Frontiers in Partnerships: There is clearly a common desire for humanitarian actors to rethink how they collaborate with peers, local entities and non-traditional actors when it comes to developing and promoting innovation. However, there is no single “best practice” or template that will fit all situations. Some co-creation partnerships will require INGOs, with the support of forward-leaning donors like Innovation Norway, to revisit the ways in which they procure goods and services, vet organizations and manage intellectual property. In other cases, some of these systemic issues may be side-stepped through using existing templates like the Venture Client Model (thanks to lastmileclimate.org for the insight) to contract for existing solutions, using prize modalities like Ideas for Impact as an alternative to rigid grant mechanisms, or helping innovators more easily access capital like through initiatives like Kumwe Hub. 

Thanks to the very active participation of locally-led actors from South Sudan (RISE consortium and Titi Foundation) and Somalia (Shaqadoon), as well as global leaders in innovation ecosystem-building  (Elrha and Start Network), RILx23 also demonstrated that true decentralization and localization of humanitarian innovation systems will require connecting several strands of work at multiple levels. 

We global actors must first coordinate our interventions at the response or national level more closely to avoid adding complexity and duplication to the ecosystem and prevent the crowding out of locally-led initiatives in the space, while at the same time providing support tailored to the specific needs of the context. Secondly, global and local humanitarian innovation actors together will need to figure out how to leverage the growing investments being made in community-led innovation to generate transformative impact at scale.  The work of such projects like CLIP and C4FC and the efforts of specialized entities like Civic (a RIL global Member) and MIT D-Lab to help local populations struggling with issues of vulnerability and fragility find their own solutions is inspiring and a very welcome reversal of the top-down, one-size-fits-all innovation processes of the past. Yet this bottom-up, participatory approach comes with its own set of challenges and questions. How can local solutions scale, and knowledge spread, from community to community? Can a hyperlocal approach also tap into economies of scale?  How will this approach connect to national or response-level plans and initiatives?  I certainly don’t have the answers to these questions but I am keen to see Response Innovation Lab work with others to explore this key facet of the localization agenda. 

Speaking of working with others, there were two important gaps in the attendance list for RILx23 that have given me pause. If we the humanitarian system is to help scale transformative solutions and deliver impact rapidly, we will need to do so with two sets of actors with whom we are not currently engaging effectively. At our event in Nairobi, we were blessed with the presence of large multinational corporations like Microsoft who are playing an increasingly engaged role in the humanitarian innovation space and of smaller social enterprises and start-ups like our old friends at Sisitech and our new ones at EITI, but we did not manage to attract larger national corporations that hold large employee networks and even larger customer bases in countries affected by disaster and fragility. These companies are also on the frontlines of humanitarian crisis and are both drivers and beneficiaries of the economic and social development of vulnerable communities, yet we are not finding ways of consistently including them in our discussions. That must change if we are to leverage institutions that are deeply embedded into the fabric of the societies we want to support and have the power to accelerate change.

This is even more the case when it comes to engaging with national government agencies.  None were present at our global gathering and I don’t think they are necessarily well represented in other humanitarian innovation forums.  This is a definite failure on our part as public actors hold the key to the scaling pathways of so many types of innovation, with the power to dramatically speed up adoption of solutions they support but also to immediately prohibit the adoption of systems that do not conform to their priorities or procedures.  I know full well that engaging with public agencies, especially in fragile settings where governance itself is in crisis, can be a slow and arduous process, at times seemingly incompatible with the rapid and agile ethos of innovation. Yet, we are doing ourselves an ultimate disservice by avoiding engagement with these actors until the time when their blessing becomes a necessity.  How likely or easily gotten will that blessing be if public officials have not been part of the development or early adoption of a solution that directly impacts the population(s) they serve (and often mobilizes their own workforce and collaborators)?  We may also be missing the fact that many of these public entities are themselves making investments in the innovation space and hiring specialized staff. By better engaging government actors alongside a wider range of economic actors, humanitarian innovation ecosystems will significantly increase the sources ,scaling pathways and impact potential of innovations.  I am hoping that RIL’s adoption of the Smart Communities Coalition platform will help us provide that forum for engagement in East Africa but it will be up to all of our Response Labs to find ways of drawing in these actors, or better yet, meeting them on their own turf.

Finally, RILx23 also helped me realize the dangers of looking at innovation through the lens of specific products and services as opposed to wider “families” of solutions. During our four days of programming, we held “show and tells” where our platforms or collaborators would showcase specific innovations on the scaling journey. If you look at the MarketPlace page of our website, you will also see RIL promote distinct products or services. Yet we all know that transformative change usually comes through a range of solutions that address a challenge in similar ways. Take digital Cash Transfer Programming, for instance, one of the great disruptions in the humanitarian system – it did not come through the scaling of a single provider like Mastercard or Red Rose, but through an array of different solutions like telecom-based Mobile Money, Micro-Credit based systems or new fintech startups. The same is true for almost every transformation, from solar solutions to reverse osmosis filtration – no response can depend only on one solution provider. Our system, however, is built in a way that pushes actors to limit their support to a single brand of innovation, either because there is a perceived incentive for implementers to develop their own solution internally (making all external solutions competitors), because funding allows for only one pilot or scaling project per challenge or because we grow attached to specific teams of innovators through previous collaboration (something that all of us at RIL have felt – it is nearly impossible not to get personally attached to a social entrepreneur you see struggling every day to improve the lives of those less fortunate).  Yes, competition can be a powerful force for innovation and a great revelator of effectiveness and efficiency but it requires an ecosystem where actors are willing and to consider and try all options available to them. Response Innovation Lab has taken a small step in that direction by updating its MatchMaker Solutions Pack tool to steer the demand-side actors toward considering innovation types before suggesting individual products. We will need to continue finding ways to provide as many viable options as possible so that the scaling of a solution does not end up being dependent on only one provider.

Well, this ended up being a much longer post than I had envisioned. Maybe it shows how much I needed to take a step back from work and gain a little more perspective. More likely, it demonstrates how much work there is still to be done in building the kind of humanitarian innovation ecosystems that will ultimately deliver the impact we want to see.  That is a challenge that will fully engage RIL for years to come but also extends well beyond our network to call upon new collaborations with many different types of partners. I hope that we will have a lot of new insights to share for RILx24, wherever and at whichever altitude it will be held.