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.

>>> Click to view.

A core part of the Response Innovation Lab’s core activities is supporting the process and development of mapping the actors, innovation, and challenges of the humanitarian response. The objective of these activities is to help partners navigate the humanitarian innovation ecosystem and find potential partners.

The Uganda Response Innovation Lab ( Uganda RIL) has developed a dynamic map of the local ecosystem to better identify actors, innovators, in the response. The map is comprehensive of the humanitarian and social impact innovation stakeholders and supporters in the innovation ecosystem.

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Covid-19 Innovation Prizes for local initiatives were developed to support innovations that had sprung up in response to community needs related to COVID-19, where solutions had already been ideated, tried, and worked. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Norway, via Save the Children Norway, funded the Prize modality. The total was 26 prizes in the categories of:

• The Response, Prevention, and Treatment

• Continuous Learning

• Sustained Livelihoods

• Refugee-led innovations

The winners were selected end of 2020 and will be announced in March 2021 publically. They each received a small prize based on evidence of Covid-19 innovative activities completed in 2020 and tailored coaching.

>>> Click to see the call

RIL Uganda was selected to facilitate the Dutch Relief Alliance Innovation Fund Call for proposal. This 3rd round of the fund was designed to support innovation with a high emphasis on local ownership from the theme-selection, to challenge-identification, to partnership building and expert review of applications. The fund is now investing 3 million EUR into local humanitarian innovation in Energy and in Safety and Protection. There will be 6 pilots implemented in 2021 through DRA-affiliated INGOs and Ugandan NGOs and startups.

>>> Click to see the call.

The RIL built a consortium with the International Rescue Committee and Impact Initiatives to secured a 3-year DFID/FCDO award for the U-Learn program (GBP 6 million). The program is designed to support improvements in the quality and accountability of protracted refugee crisis programming, in collaboration with a range of actors, institutions, and individuals across Uganda. The RIL is leading the overall consortium management, and responsible for the delivery of the Learning Hub (one of the three core program pillars of U-Learn). The Learning Hub supports and facilitates cross-sectoral learning within the Uganda refugee response to support the uptake of evidence. Amongst other things, the Learning Hub will foster learning by curating existing resources and making them more accessible, bringing people together to learn and increase collaboration, and by identifying and filling learning gaps.

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U-Learn Consortium quickly pivoted to deliver a special COVID-19 adaptation program:

• Helped the Ministry of Health revamp its information portal targeting responders (COVID-19 Response Information Hub).

• Conducted a deep-dive assessment on the topic of COVID-19 Risk Communication and Community Engagement (RCCE). The assessment aimed to strengthen the evidence base surrounding RCCE approaches in Uganda, exploring information accessibility, communication modalities, risk perceptions, and behavior changes in particular in refugee communities, to inform the successful delivery of RCCE.

• A Good Practice study was conducted on the Refugee Engagement Forum (REF) which will be disseminated during Q2 of 2021. The REF, implemented by the Ugandan refugee response community, promotes Accountability to Affected Populations (AAP) in line with The Grand Bargain commitments by including people who are receiving aid in the decisions affecting their lives. It enables 37 representatives of the refugee community from all settlements and Kampala to convene and discuss matters of the refugee response vital to them.

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SafeBangle is Ugandan based social enterprise devoted to designing and developing solutions to curb Sexual and Gender-Based-Violence for a free safer world. SafeBangle Team is developing a wearable safety tool that can be used by the would-be victims of assaults, SGBV, and other forms of injustices to be empowered to call their trusted relatives and loved ones for help and notify them where they are in-case stranded and trapped. RIL Uganda and the CSU are supporting the team through advisory services as well as a part-time residency opportunity for one of the team members that are able to access daily coaching as well as the RIL tools and network. This past year, SafeBangle won an award by Spindle for 30 MOST INSPIRING DIGITAL INNOVATIONS OF 2020.

>>> Click to learn more.

IRC approached RIL about support for a training program for urban refugees on Human-Centered Design (HCD) and Financial Literacy. After a competitive selection, young refugee graduates in Kampala organized into three self-selected groups to identify community challenges. Then together, brainstormed and generated solutions to the challenges based on human-centered design principles. The RIL provides a monetary prize to support the refinement and implementation of those project ideas and mentorship and coaching.

RIL has been developing relationships with core ecosystem entities to be able to efficiently function as a platform that connects the private sector, non-profit, academia around humanitarian challenges. During the 2020 Kampala Innovation Week, RIL was highlighted as a core member of this ecosystem, and Startup Uganda, an association of ecosystem-building organizations, also recognized the initiative. This is a great success as it demonstrates the value add of RIL.

As its hosting organization, Save the Children International was also recognized as a critical humanitarian innovation convener and enabler in Uganda and on the international scene from the various speaking opportunities from the past few years.

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Over the past year, the Response Innovation Lab Uganda has begun developing a partnership with the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation in Uganda, with an MoU, signed in March 2021 formalizing the partnership. The partnership's nature is to promote problem-solving socially-oriented innovation in the humanitarian and development sectors and strengthen the innovation ecosystem in Uganda. We will specifically seek to conduct innovators' capacity building, joint resource mobilization, organization events in innovation-related matters, collaboration in evidence-generation, dissemination, advocacy, and support of the local innovation ecosystem with a focus on humanitarian and resilience-building innovation-clusters. The parties will be working on innovative solutions to some of the challenges in Disaster Preparedness and Refugees management, Gender, Labor, and Social Development related issues.

>>> See more information.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Response Innovation Lab, in partnership with Engineers Without Borders, held an Innovation Competition for Ugandan innovators for the design of solid-soap dispensers. The winning design is now being used by Engineers Without Borders, and Save the Children across 30 schools with good initial feedback. Additionally, the dispenser is being sold independently by its creator, who has produced and sold 267 dispensers between July 2020 and January 2021. This solution, produced by a local team with materials available in Uganda, was a rapid response to the need for Covid-19 prevention, affordable and accessible during a time of international travel and import ban.

>>> Read more.

In partnership with the UN Capital Development Fund, and on the World Food Programme's request, the RIL delivered a Matchmaker package on financial literacy training solutions. Financial literacy training is vital for short-term sound use of cash-based transfers and longer-term for inclusive development, equitable empowerment, and financial inclusion. The Covid-19 pandemic presents new challenges in delivering training with safety restrictions that require limited human contact. In-person training puts the trainer and the community at risk of the disease spreading. Numerous internet-based solutions exist to deliver learning, communities affected by the digital divide with limited access to the internet or smartphone device ownership risk being left behind. For instance, the proportion of the population owning a phone in Uganda is 71%, but this proportion drops to 43% among refugees. Hence, Organizations like the UN's World Food Programme are looking to continue delivering training on financial literacy, are searching for innovation in process, method, and technology to implement training with limited human contact under Covid-19 safety restriction.

>>> Click to see the packet.

The Uganda RIL produced a mapping of existing Education Technology (EdTech) in Uganda (and neighboring countries). It is the product of a targeted Task Team formed by the Education in Emergencies Working Group, co-convened with theAga Khan Foundation and in partnership with Briter Bridges. To maximize efficiencies, effectiveness, collaboration, and scale of these solutions, a comprehensive mapping of the existing EdTech landscape (spanning profit and non-profit, humanitarian and development initiatives) was completed. This mapping will enable better coordination, reduce duplication, highlight partnership, and scaling opportunities, and promote efficiency in investment decisions in this sector. The report provides an analysis of 36 solutions/projects.

>> Click here to access the report.

A green challenge for local entrepreneurs
Funded by RVO/Netherlands and DANIDA, the RIL Uganda, in partnership with Mercy Corps and SNV organized a field-level multi-stakeholder convene event at a refugee settlement to map challenges in accessing clean energy for refugees and host communities, environmental aspects of humanitarian operations and other environmental and energy challenges in this setting. The results of this event guided the design of the Green Innovation Challenge Fund. The RIL then coordinated the competitive selection process of four top applications. The following pilots are currently underway and a Green Innovation Catalogue is being designed to share learnings on those pilots and other innovative solutions in the field of energy and environment which have been mapped.

• ENVenture: A social enterprise that creates last-mile community-based energy cooperatives by linking them with certified suppliers and providing business-development support

• Kumi Kumi: A digital marketplace for refugees that tests point-collection system for refugees to unlock access to clean energy solutions

• Raising Gabdho Foundation: A social enterprise national NGO that developed a holistic model to support community entrepreneurship in the energy sector to transform beneficiaries of distribution of energy assistance into providers of solutions using low-tech

• ANCHOR: A national NGO that focuses on peace-building and social behavioral change that will partner with VIAMO the international social enterprise to test if Interactive Voice Response can encourage increased adoption of clean energy solutions

Akaboxi is a Ugandan software startup that provides a digital financial inclusion system to enable community-saving groups to manage and monitor their savings together. Akaboxi helps saving groups of 20-25 members, who are generally women farmers or young people in rural areas and excluded from financial services, digitalize their bookkeeping, replace the traditional cash box, and open accounts at formal financial institutions. A pilot is ongoing in the refugee settlement of Kiryandongo in partnership with Save the Children. Based on successful initial findings showing increasing trust of members of saving groups into their saving schemes and accelerating their contributions, RIL invested a second round of funding (bringing the total support to USD 17,000) to help Akaboxi iterate based on the learnings of the first phase.

>> Click here to read about financial training.

Response Innovation Lab Uganda, the International Rescue Committee and IMPACT Initiatives formed the U-LEARN partnership and are launching a 3-year DFID-supported program. U-LEARN is designed to support improvements in the quality and accountability of refugee crisis and nexus programming, in collaboration with a range of actors, institutions, and individuals across Uganda. The RIL is leading on implementing the consortium and is responsible for the delivery of the Learning Hub. The Learning Hub will be a facility that will curate, generate and support the uptake of the project, organization and response-wide learning, innovations, best practices, and solutions to achieve systemic change from implementation to policy level. It will be cross-sectoral and accessible to all stakeholders in the emergency and nexus programs.