Innovation is a journey. On the path to disruption, evolution or failure, the people involved invariably learn a few things along the way. We want to use this space to bring you their stories.
Nestled within the challenging terrain of the Rhino Camp Refugee Settlement in Uganda, a beacon of hope is meticulously emerging through the collaboration of Gulu University, the Response Innovation Lab (RIL), and Save the Children. This unfolding narrative, generously backed by Innovation Norway under the Local Innovations for Nutrition Solutions (LINS) project, unfolds against the backdrop of two critical issues plaguing refugee-hosting communities—malnutrition and limited access to diverse, nutritious foods.
In the heart of Uganda, a transformative story unfolds—Prum Ventures, a beacon of innovation and compassion, is rewriting the narrative of community well-being. This is the inspiring chronicle of Walter Dunga and Prudence Mucunguzi, visionary entrepreneurs on a mission to combat micronutrient deficiencies and reshape the health landscape of the region.
Under the support function, the Uganda Response Innovation Lab (U-RIL) supports innovators and implementers to maximise their ability to deliver successful innovations in a specific humanitarian context. One of these support avenues is seed funding to test prototypes or conduct pilots. The seed funding is open to entities registered in Uganda (Uganda-led or refugee-led) and with an existing proof of concept.
Response Innovation Lab has just released two short videos summarizing key 2023 achievements in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and East and Central Africa (ECA) regions.
The global Response Innovation Lab partnership is proud to welcome Danish Refugee Council as its newest Member. DRC has joined founding partners World Vision International, Save the Children International, Oxfam International and Civic to help further RIL’s mission to transform response innovation ecosystems in humanitarian contexts. DRC’s singular focus on displacement programming and community empowerment will help drive our programme to further explore how grassroots level innovation initiatives can better connect with response-level humanitarian innovation systems so that community-led solutions can impact populations at scale.
Response Innovation Lab and the World Food Programme have joined forces to facilitate the development and adoption of innovative solutions to key challenges in the Somali food system space. This collaboration culminated in a workshop held in Hargeisa on September 19-21 and co-facilitated by the two partners.
On Friday, 29 September 2023, Uganda's Response Innovation Lab (U-RIL), in partnership with Startup Uganda, hosted an event to disseminate the findings of the Landscape Analysis of the Uganda Innovation Ecosystem and to launch SMILE, an interactive ecosystem map.
RIL Affiliate Facility Kumwe Hub has been supporting Rwandan social enterprise Rainbow Health Food with critical investment capital. This funding has allowed the company to scale up its business of providing nutrient-rich foods to school children. That story is told in the video below.
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:
We are thrilled to share the remarkable outcomes of RILx23, the annual event organized by Response Innovation Lab (RIL), which took place in Nairobi last week. RILx23 served as a vibrant platform that brought together diverse stakeholders from the Response Innovation Lab network, alongside selected global and regional humanitarian innovation actors.
The Uganda RIL has just published its first Matchmaker Solutions Pack of 2023, on the challenge of linking refugee employment seekers to available jobs in their areas. Read the report here to see what solutions were proposed.
Response Innovation Lab is preparing its most high profile event to date — RILx23. The event will take place in Nairobi on June 12-15 under the theme of New Frontiers in humanitarian innovation partnerships.
We are very excited to announce that the Smart Communities Coalition and Response Innovation Lab have decided to join forces and merge. The Coalition will join our network to become RIL’s private sector convening arm.
We are thrilled to announce the successful completion of the first Convener Event organized by the Gaza Response Innovation Lab (GRIL), hosted by Oxfam. This event brought together organizations and partners working on WASH and Food Security in the Gaza Strip to address water challenges in the area.
In Uganda, refugee-led organizations (RLOs) are developing innovative solutions to everyday problems found throughout their settlements and host communities. In this blog post we shine a spotlight on 13 RLOs creating, testing, and providing new solutions for refugees and others.
Financial inclusion efforts and savings groups are common interventions in humanitarian and development programming. Individually or combined they help promote savings, increase access to credit and ultimately, build self-reliance. With more commercial and mainstream financial services moving online, there are also efforts to do the same at the community level. With this in mind, Ugandan company Akaboxi developed a way to help digitise village savings and loan associations (VSLAs) and link them to banks and other finance institutions. Akaboxi hoped their innovation would not only help people save but also help them build a base from which they could access commercial financial services in the future.
Starting around May 2022, RIL and Audiopedia Foundation ran three interactive events in Kampala. These events also included developing interesting case studies of open source in action and running a contribution competition. Through these events it was hoped that existing open-source users and developers would find humanitarian and development actors to partner with and that more people, regardless of their background, would feel more confident to try using open-source software.
In May, 2021, World Vision and Save the Children (which leads the Education Cannot Wait consortium) signed an MOU to collaborate and scale up the Digital Attendance Tracking system across 42 schools across World Vision, Save the Children, Care and Sidra in Puntland.
SomRIL has supported the Somali Livestock Insurance Consortium (SLIC) comprised off the SomReP consortium, ILRI (Internation Livestock Research Institute) and the Federal Government of Somalia, raise awareness across many public and private stakeholders, conduct feasibility studies, support the government for a task-force, and support the development of a Policy Roadmap. We also created an explainer video in English, Somali and Arabic: https://youtu.be/uQhcLojJxjY
In 2018, the RIL convened the Somali WASH cluster to identify and prioritize needs in this sector. Once of the challenges was around remote water monitoring. The RIL eventually got WV to ‘own’ this challenge, and the RIL helped WV win funding from the Humanitarian Grand Challenges to pilot new water sensors. This pilot is concluding, and the RIL has supported with an evaluation and a case study video: https://youtu.be/8YsRvAzC3Qs
In early 2021, the initial pilot between WV and OGOA Health concluded at the two targeted health facilities. However, the system continues to operate, and eventually funding was secured to expand the system to connect a total of 15 health facilities. MOUs were also signed with the Puntland Ministry of Health, endorsing the system.
The SomRIL continued our partnership with Startup Blink, so share our data to showcase Somali startups on a global platform and to profile the opportunities in this frontier economy. In 2021, Somalia moved up in the ranking by one, to be the 94th most innovative country for startups. In May, 2022, the new rankings were released and Somalia dropped to 98th. This is still a major accomplishment as only the top 100 countries are ranked.
You can see Somalia’s page on the StartupBlink site here: https://somalia.startupblink.com/
Based on feedback received from users of our original Evidence Toolkit, RIL began work on developing a more focused package of tools and instructions specifically aimed at teams implementing innovation pilots and scaling projects. This content is made available to all through a Creative Commons license and can be found on this page: https://www.responseinnovationlab.com/toolkits
In 2021, the SomRIL partnered with the Internet of Production Alliance (IOPA), and two of their members, Field Ready and Humanitarian Open Street Maps. This was around the Open Know Where (OKW) standards that were just released in 2021 to help standardize the mapping of factories to promote local manufacturing. We conducted a small pilot together with World Vision, Oxfam, the Somaliland Chamber of Commerce and the SIMAD iLab to map factories in Mogadishu and Hargeisa. We also had the standards translated into Somali. You can see these materials here: https://www.internetofproduction.org/open-know-where
In our efforts to support localization efforts, we have the privilege to lead a multi-country and multi-agency cross learning imitative. This project is working with Care Somalia and World Vision Sudan and World Vision South Sudan, 31 LNGOs from across the three countries, and Sadar Institute. The goal is to build the capacity of humanitarian LNGOs so that they are better equipped to respond. This initiative has been developing 10 curriculums that range from Community Driven Resilience, to Early Warning Systems and much more.
Click here to see the video series developed as part of the C4FC project
The challenges of the pandemic also revealed opportunities for innovation as it showed that the temporary covid telehealth services could be work in Somalia. Hello Caafi was launched in 2021 and is the first and only telehealth service in Somalia. The SomRIL has been working to support the expansion of this service, and to broker partnerships.
The SomRIL supported the SIMAD iLab to host the Global Goals Jam in Mogadishu in September, 2021. This event looked to using design thinking to address challenges in Somalia around achieving the SDGs.
In December, 2021, the SomRIL supported iRise as they organized the 3rd Mogadishu Tech Summit. We were able to organize 2 panel discussions. The first was on health innovations, and we facilitated the participation of Khalid, the founder and CEO of OGOW Health, and Sahra, the co-founder and CEO of Hello Caafi. The second was on innovations in the education sector where we facilitated the participation of World Vision, Save the Children, the Puntland MoE and Sisitech, to talk about the importance of public-private partnership and collaboration around the digital attendance pilot.
In 2019, the RIL co-convened an event with the Somali Food Security Cluster to better understand the challenges in the sector. One challenge that emerged was around the sustainability of agriculture capacity in local institutions. The pandemic delayed the progression of this MatchMaker submission, but in 2021 the SomRIL was able to partner with the SomReP consortium, the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation, and the Somali National University (SNU). This partnership and pilot is still unfolding, but the intent is for the SomReP to share their climate smart agriculture modules, have them endorsed by the MoAI, and then to develop a curriculum for the SNU to own and to offer to NGOs and others.
