In December 2020, RIL held a week-long virtual global retreat to share reflections from the past year on each of the humanitarian responses and the challenges, successes, and plans for the upcoming year. Each session is about 30 minutes long.

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The Somalia Response Innovation Lab successfully completed our 7th Solution Package. This was done to address challenges identified by the Somali Food Security Cluster around sustainable agricultural institutional capacity in Somalia. The pandemic delayed our recommendations, but we used this time to do further market research into the demand for agricultural training in Somalia. We are now in the process of brokering a partnership between the government, academic institutions,s and a consortium of NGOs to work together to address these challenges.

>>> Click to view the packet.

Nishant Das, Somali RIL Lab Lead, was recently recognized by The Start Network for "Faster and Early Action" regarding the coordination of local innovators to support preventative COVID-19 messaging to high-risk vulnerable populations in Somalia.

>>> Click to read the recognition.

The Somali RIL presented at the Global Digital Development Forum in May 2020 on the collaborative public-private approach in Somalia to build partnerships and leverage humanitarian mechanisms in the co-creation of open-sourced public health messaging products that scaled to a national prevention response campaign to COVID-19.

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After conducting a Convene with the WASH cluster in 2019 to determine the top challenges in Somalia, WV Somalia decided to ‘own’ one of the problems brought to light. The RIL worked with WV Somalia and WV Canada to successfully win Grand Challenges Canada funding from their Humanitarian Innovation Fund. The project will pilot a WASH monitoring system to track water quality and flow in hard-to-access areas.

Somalia reported the first confirmed case of COVID-19 on 16 March 2020. Quickly, responding to COVID-19 became the major priority for the government, humanitarian actors, and stakeholders working in the region. Due to the limitations in existing infrastructure, plus the challenges around resourcing the response, and openness has been created for more collaboration and coordination.

The Response Innovation Lab (RIL) mobilized quickly to support those directly involved in the COVID-19 response by identifying and defining challenges, then working to rapidly provide solutions that can be deployed. To further support stakeholders involved in the response, the RIL conducted a rapid mini-assessment (survey) in April 2020, focused on understanding the needs and priorities of humanitarian actors in the COVID-19 response. These results are being shared openly to foster learning, improve coordination, and prioritize resources to areas of need.

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Even before COVID-19 struck, nearly 3.2 million Somali's lacked access to health services. The need for health systems that protect everyone has never been more urgent. The SomRIL brokered a pilot between OGOW EMR and World Vision Somalia to utilize innovation to support rural and urban health facilities with medical records, health promotion, and immunization uptake. Providing needed information to providers and caregivers Somalis is benefited and empowered, especially women and girls, to access community health and primary care services. This collaboration is critical to providing life-saving information to providers and caregivers to make informed decisions.

>>> Click to learn more about OGOW EMR.

The RIL is working with Save the Children and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine to bring a bar soap innovation that was piloted in Iraq to Somalia. Surprise Soap is a bar of soap with a toy inside. SomRIL is coordinating with different stakeholders, including the SomRep, to bring this into the Somalia humanitarian response. Locally, a local soap manufacturer has been identified to support the production capacity in order to make the soap locally. The completion of this project will be great to see as it bridges, the Somalia humanitarian response with economic recovery.

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To combat misinformation and rumors, the RIL partnered with the SomReP consortium (an NGO association) to equip trusted local leaders with the right tools. In this project, 44 Early Warning Committees, made up of trusted local leaders, were equipped with tablets that have pre-loaded public health material.

The Somali Response Innovation Lab (SomRIL) began leveraging our network before a confirmed COVID-19 case in Somalia. Working with various innovators, we developed public health messaging in local Somali languages to reach across the country through a network of partners. By March 2020, the RIL had four videos in wide circulation that the RIL's innovation partners produced on a pro-bono basis. The videos were the first Somali language public health tool for the country. As a result, these materials circulated widely, and the RIL found itself at the forefront of a public health awareness campaign for Somalia.

A co-creation process was used to gather input from the government, humanitarian actors, the private sector, donors, and academia to inform the videos and the distribution. The focus was to bridge global and local expertise, quickly determining local needs and priorities, and contextualize inputs from these actors into the execution. Additionally, by involving actors in the video development, they became vested in its success and supported the wide endorsement, adoption, and dissemination across Somalia.

RIL supported the development of messaging tools through three main partners:

OGOW EMR: A Somali health-tech start-up with an Electronic Medical Records platform incorporates a Somali language public health library. The RIL supported them in developing videos targeted to adults and health care workers.

• COVID-19 Awareness

• Basic Protective measures against the new Coronavirus:

Poet Nation Media: The RIL partnered with education-entertainment innovators, Poet Nation Media, to build off their early childhood education program called Geedka Mooska. Together, we developed a segment called Hiddo & Hirsi – the Protector Twins. These twins envision themselves as superheroes protecting their community from the Coronavirus and show how they deal with closed school challenges, psycho-social and mental health awareness, gender inclusivity and handicap representation, and much more! The stories creatively wove together Somali folktales and proverbs and gave them a fresh spin on current events.

• As part of this initiative, a case study video was also created to provide some background on the process: Behind the Scenes of Hiddo & Hirsi.

IMS Radio Ergo: RIL is partnering with International Media Support (IMS), which runs the Radio Ergo platform in Somalia. This short-wave radio broadcast covers the entire Somali-speaking region, and their partnership with 18 local FM partners rebroadcast their programs. Together we have developed a radio drama that will entertain listeners and address COVID-19 related subject matter.

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Somaliland specific video: To address concerns from the Somaliland Ministry of Health, the RIL worked with Somaliland actors Shaqadoon and HarHub to develop a Somaliland-specific message.

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The approach utilized by the RIL in Somalia was turned into a framework that could be replicated for other responses - the Adaptive Response Messaging (ARM). Humanitarian actors in Yemen approached the Somali RIL to replicate this approach in a small-scale pilot that was completed with wide success in December 2020. The content has been endorsed by the Somali government (Ministry of Health). It can also be found in the official Repository of COVID-19 Resources under the joint coordination body between the Ministry of Health and the UN, the Risk Communication and Community Engagement (RCCE) taskforce.

Due to RIL's early mobilization of ARM, the materials have been widely shared on social media, through official communication channels, embedded into digital beneficiary registration processes, audio clips used as pre-recorded messages for COVID-19 hotlines, television, and much more.

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Somalia RIL hosted a “Sankalp Dialogues” webinar in Partnership with TetheredUp and the Sankalp Forum. The focus of the webinar is to hear from an enterprise, a business support organization, an academic institution, and a consulting firm based out of Somalia and how they are working towards being more resilient to shocks caused by crisis, such as COVID-19. Nishant Das, the Somalia Response Innovation Lab spoke with Abdulkareem Hassan Jama from City University of Mogadishu, Rahma Ahmed from Asal Consulting, and Mustafa Othman from Shaqodoon Organization during the webinar. The session was moderated by Arielle Molino from Intellecap's Sankalp Forum Team.

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Every year in Nairobi there is a global impact investor forum for ecosystem stakeholders to come together, convene, and push each other forward. The Somali RIL research into the Somali innovation ecosystem led the organizers of Sankalp to ask the RIL to showcase the many opportunities Somalia had, as a “Frontier Economy,” despite the challenges.

The RIL brought together its local partnership with SomReP and BRCiS consortiums to co-fund the event, and to facilitate a panel discussion. The panel was moderated by Nasra Ismail (former Director of the Somali NGO Consortium), and an insightful conversation was had about partnerships, investment, and innovation in Somalia.

>>> Click to view the sessions:

• 10 min highlight video

• 90 min full session video

The MatchMaker program is a new online platform developed by the Response Innovation Lab that seeks to connect humanitarian problem holders with tested solutions. Whether in the public or private sector, our program is open to any organization that is interested in using new solutions to solve humanitarian challenges. Users of the service can be humanitarian organizations, government ministries, the private sector, CBOs, social enterprises, or any organization that is interested to use new solutions to solve humanitarian challenges. The Matchmaker has been piloted in the five RIL country labs since the beginning of 2018. Watch this video to learn more about the process.

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When piloting humanitarian innovations, it is important to gather evidence around it to know whether it is having the desired positive impact intended. The Response Innovation Lab (RIL) has developed an Innovation M&E Toolkit to support you in this process. This video highlights how the M&E toolkit was utilized in piloting the innovation OGOW EMR, a health record application for healthcare providers and parents, in Somalia. This toolkit has been developed and tested with the Start Network, DANIDA, the Humanitarian Innovation Fund (HIF), ALNAP, Save the Children, World Vision, and DFID. This video is a short case study for the toolkit’s use in Somalia to gather evidence around the OGOW EMR digital medical records, health pilot project with World Vision.

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When piloting humanitarian innovations, it is important to gather evidence around it to know whether it is having the desired positive impact intended. The Response Innovation Lab (RIL) has developed an Innovation M&E Toolkit to support you in this process. This video is a short case study for the toolkit’s use in Somalia to gather evidence around the Digital Attendance Application (DAA) education pilot with World Vision. This toolkit has been developed and tested with the Start Network, DANIDA, the Humanitarian Innovation Fund (HIF), ALNAP, Save the Children, World Vision, and DFID.

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Part of the RIL Somalia’s work has been to research and map the Somali Innovation Ecosystem for the benefit of all actors working in Somalia and those who wish to enter into the market. This work shows the vibrancy of the current landscape, the connections that are possible between existing actors, and the opportunities that exist for further collaboration and innovation within the context.

The RIL has curated a digital exhibit to shine a spotlight on a selection of innovations identified as part of this mapping that is creating impact in their respective fields. The initiatives profiled have been carefully selected to showcase the diversity that is flourishing in a wide range of sectors. The innovations cover a broad range; online platforms, to low-tech last-mile solutions, solutions driven by the private sector in response to market demand, and innovations that aim to strengthen the learning outcomes of children in Somalia. Some of these initiatives are well established, and some are constantly iterating and adapting to stay relevant in a changing context. What all these innovations have in common is that they are contributing to building a brighter future for everyone in Somalia.

>> Click here to see the Somali Innovation Spotlight.

With support from RIL Somalia, the Digital Attendance Application (DAA) has been scaled to Somalia. DAA is an application developed by UNICEF and students at the University of Nairobi’s C4D Lab who later formed Sisitech, a Nairobi-based global software company. DAA tracks student attendance quickly, safely, and efficiently to support learning and school re-entry, thus providing insight on out-of-school children and dropouts. RIL Somalia and World Vision worked with Sisitech to pilot the DAA in the Puntland, to keep children in school, learning, and in a supportive environment.

The DAA has an interest from the Somali government and other partners to adopt and improve attendance tracking. Additionally, the Ministry of Education would like to have the DAA integrated into the Education Management Information System being developed.

>> Click to watch a video.

Response Innovation Lab Somalia launched a report presenting the findings from the two-year, OFDA funded RISE innovation ecosystem mapping study. The study seeks to provide a comprehensive understanding of the key actors, factors, and relationships within Somalia’s humanitarian innovation sector as a result of the work done over the last two years. Specifically, the study identifies needs, opportunities, and gaps in the existing ecosystem as well as potential barriers to and drivers of a successful, thriving innovation ecosystem.

>> Click here to see the interactive report and engage with the full data set.