The Journey So Far
Five years ago, Response Innovation Lab launched its first platform in Jordan, kicking off an adventure that continues to prove exciting and essential to this day. To mark this milestone and the start of a new phase in our initiative, we wanted to share with you some of the most noteworthy accomplishments of our amazing colleagues and partners. Together, we have grown RIL into the largest network of field-based humanitarian innovation platforms in the world and have collectively demonstrated that decentralizing innovation processes, strengthening response-level ecosystems, promoting locally-developed solutions and encouraging horizontal scaling can improve humanitarian and “nexus” programming while also delivering on the promises of the Grand Bargain.
As nearly all innovators can attest, the journey to scale is rarely a smooth one and RIL’s came with many humbling setbacks, hasty pivots and valuable lessons learned. Over and over again, we have had to adapt our model, tools and expectations to match the realities of our operating contexts and meet the needs of our networks. This included reducing the size and ambitions of our Central Support Unit (HQ team) to shift as much responsibility and resources to our Country Labs, making our tools and interventions more user-friendly (particularly for non-humanitarian actors), investing more time and effort to identify scaling partners much earlier in the piloting process and accepting the fact that RIL will never be the only initiative delivering on improving humanitarian innovation systems around the world.
These hard-earned lessons have made RIL more capable and resilient. Some unexpected pivots have also yielded unforeseen promises and opportunities. By taking on the U-LEARN project, our team in Uganda has moved RIL into the broader response Knowledge Management space but managed to introduce key innovations into the system. With the threat of Covid looming in Somalia, our SomRIL team connected humanitarian implementers with local content creators to generate highly-resoonant, effective, context-specific health and hygiene messages quickly and at low cost. The end of the Hurricane Maria response in Puerto Rico precipitated the transition of our platform there to the hastily created label of RIL Affiliate Facility which has since allowed us to extend our global network to a more diverse group of innovation hubs, including two led by local NGOs.
Five years in, we still have much to learn but feel confident about the future. For the next phase of RIL’s adventure, our priorities will include expanding our network through a variety of new platforms and partnerships, accelerate our efforts to embed our facilities more deeply into the ecosystems they serve and delivering more evidence of impact. Our teams have already started to deliver on these goals, with the opening of the Gaza Response Innovation Lab and the upcoming launch of a RIL Country Lab in NW Syria, a partnership with the Dutch Relief Alliance to strengthen the innovation process in their Joint Responses around the world, having more than half of our platforms be led by national staff and helping multiple innovations find a pathway to response-wide scaling.
As you read through the stories in this report and explore our website, I would like to encourage you to engage directly with us at the global or response level if you or organization have an interest in joining our movement. I also want to take this opportunity to personally thank our Founding Partners -- Civic, World Vision, Oxfam and Save the Children – for making Response Innovation Lab a reality and the incredible staff (past and present) who have made it thrive. We all look forward to many more years of new partnerships, pivots, achievements and impact.