Identifying, Defining, and Mapping Challenges & Local Innovations
South Sudan has been devastated by decades of war that caused the deaths of two million people and forced four million to flee. The crisis continues to face multiple humanitarian challenges including internal conflict and displacement, food insecurity and high rates of malnutrition, poor access to basic services including education and healthcare, and weak child protection mechanisms
Save the Children South Sudan asked the Response Innovation Lab to support in convening their team of problem solvers from the country office and its implementation partners to define challenges in their humanitarian response, identify priorities, and innovations that can make a long-term difference.
The RIL team ran an innovation workshop to build capacity across Save the Children staff and partners by identifying 3-4 program implementation challenges and working towards adopting innovations that are currently ready to use in South Sudan. The end-goal is finding new ways to overcome obstacles to impact through the creation of an organizational space to learn and practice innovation concepts and methods. The end result will be to increase capacity in the Save the Children South Sudan office and to be an effective adopter of innovation that leads to concrete projects ready to be piloted.
Save the Children South Sudan and the Response Innovation lab conducted a Convening of local actors to map who exists in the ecosystem, their roles, addressing the challenges, and setting the stage for solution-finding.
The Convening workshops ran over nine weeks with innovation experts conducting a “learn-by-doing” approach by:
diving into programmatic challenges
refinement of problems to facilitate finding a solution
matching innovations, how they can be adapted
concluding with a basic project design you can build on for funding and implementation
The following challenges were identified and selected by the participants:
The low capacity of teachers leads to poor educational outcomes for children.
Traditional attitudes toward gender roles and attitude toward education lead to poor educational outcomes and high dropout rates.
Lack of monitoring and accuracy of data of screening by community nutrition volunteers (CNVs) leads to children with malnutrition (SAM and MAM) not accessing nutrition services in a timely manner
Severe food production gaps lead to farmers applying negative livelihood coping strategies and contribute to acute malnutrition in children under five and pregnant and lactating women.