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.

The Iraq RIL developed an awareness-raising animated video based on WHO guidelines for the Iraqi population and those working in-country, on the risk and protective measures in regards to COVID-19. The video specifically focuses on protecting the elderly population. The animated video is a part of the broader Oxfam program - “BIBI Says” - being disseminated on all local social networks, such as radio and TV, in addition to Oxfam and RIL’s media channels.

“BIBISays” is a public health awareness campaign, with grandmothers leading the way and imparting essential advice and guidance on how to protect yourself, loved ones, and the communities from COVID-19.

>>> Click to view the video.

Response Innovation Lab worked with Save the Children’s Migration and Displacement Initiative (MDI) and their Predictive Displacement Project to host local Convener events - in Iraq and Jordan - around the development of a predictive analytics tool that will anticipate the scale and duration of conflict-driven displacement crises. At present, the lack of good data on the eventual scale and duration of forced displacement crises makes it difficult for humanitarian actors to efficiently and sustainably plan for early-stage interventions. Lack of demographical data also limits the efficiency and effectiveness with which they can plan for the specific needs of vulnerable groups within displaced populations. MDI seeks to use historical and contemporary data and machine learning to predict these characteristics of displacement, enabling better responses.

The use of predictive analytics in displacement work in the humanitarian sector has grown significantly amongst international organizations. However limited involvement or consultation has happened with field-level stakeholders. The convening events held with the Response Innovation Lab in Iraq and Jordan focus on identifying and gathering the perspectives and input of other potential end-users and other relevant stakeholders of predictive analytics tools, with Save the Children’s displacement model as an initial reference.

Particularly, the interest is in actors not well represented in typical discussions around predictive analytics in the humanitarian sector, such as

1. National and sub-national level actors working on displacement issues

2. Local and regional research and policy centers

3. Commercial actors with a stake in predicting population movements

The input of these actors will help shape the thinking for the third, external-facing phase of the project, and be a network through which to rollout other predictive tools. Learnings from the exercise will be shared with other humanitarian actors to similarly inform their work.

>>> Click to learn more.

Iraq's economy has its share of problems, and agriculture is one of the most significant challenges. Agriculture is often described as the backbone of the county, unfortunately, it is one of the most neglected sectors in Iraq. The country relies heavily on oil exports as a source of income, and other neighboring countries’ exports for agriculture. Yet fertile land and knowledge exist to make local agricultural production a source for the country. With imported goods entering the market at a low cost, local agriculture is not able to compete at the same margins and thus suffers. Agriculture is often seen as a separate entity from business, which leads to a lack of efficiency and innovation, which leads to many modern technologies, new advances, and environment-friendly practices to not be promoted.

With these challenges and more, the Iraq Response Innovation Lab launched the Agribusiness Incubator under the Go Green Initiative to support further developments in local agricultural production. The Incubator focuses on innovative ideas and adapting them to the Iraqi context with language and cultural expectations.

In 2020, the plan was to hold an extensive in-person training for innovators, however with the outbreak of COVID-19 the training moved online. Over the course of ten months, 12 projects were fully incubated, and five projects earned seedfunding of 20,000 USD each to support their launch. Some of the project highlights are using cost reduction methods through technology, reducing wasted water, introducing organic techniques, and knowledge and capacity building for local farmers.

>>> Click to learn more.

Iraq Response Innovation Lab has been working closely with two women-led social enterprises that tackle issues relating to employment and access to the market.

• Yalla Limited - One challenge in Iraq is finding service providers such as plumbers and electricians. Many times people need to ask around and wait for contacts, which isn’t helpful during an emergency. If you are starting a business as a service provider, there is the challenge of creating a customer pool with no formal marketing other than word-of-mouth. Two local Iraqi women, Ms. Ravan and Ms. Hala, launched the Yalla application which helps locate services through the app with a rating and pricing system. The app works to create a link between skilled workers and the needs of a household or other job.

• The Workshop - Supports youth and job seekers in their quest for employment, by offering a set of high-demand courses and integrated tools that support applicants in evaluating their skills, then offering training for areas where skills can improve. The platform is accessible on the web and mobile for ease. The entrepreneur behind the app, Ms. Sazan, sees the application a way for job seekers to find job vacancies, apply, and see how their skills meet the needs.

Both projects are expected to launch at the end of March 2021.

>>> Click to learn more.

One modality of the Agribusiness Incubator is focused on Social Enterprises in Iraq. As the first incubator in-country for local Iraqi NGOs, it launched in December 2020, with the support of SIDA. The incubator includes weekly group sessions and extensive one-to-one sessions with each participant on topics related to the social enterprise model, problem identification, and solution creation. The incubation continues until March 2021 where two of the participating 14 NGOs will be receive seedfunding up to 17K USD.

In Iraq, the training included in the incubation is important since the Social Enterprise model is a relatively new model in the country. The Iraq Response Innovation Lab proposed that capacitating local NGOs with knowledge and training around this model is the best way forward to support the NGO’s work on creating social impact. With a better understanding of business models and enterprise structure, these NGOs will be able to implement their projects and build sustainable revenue sources from their business models. All projects are focused on positively impacting vulnerable populations and sustainable revenue models.

>>> Click to learn more.

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.

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.

>>> Click to view

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.

>>> Click to learn more.

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.

>>> Click to learn more.

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.

• Click to view

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.

• Click to view

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.

>>> Click to learn more.

Throughout 2020, Somalia RIL has seen great utilization of the interactive directory and a detailed relationship map that provided insight into the Somali innovation ecosystem. The feedback on these tools has been positive. A trend in the feedback was that it primarily came from those in Somalia, and the Somali RIL was keen to understand how it looked at a global level.

Through some research, Somali RIL partnered with the StartUp Blink platform, which does ecosystem mapping of ~200 countries and 500+ cities worldwide. Taking the mapping information we collected through the USAID RISE project, the lab mapped the ecosystem using StartUp Blinks platforms to see how it ranked against other country-level ecosystems.

Impressively, Somalia made a debut as the 95th most innovative country for start-ups! Only the top 100 countries are ranked. Due to this data, Somalia was placed on a global platform with a positive entrepreneurial storyline, a welcomed positive storyline on the country.

>>> Click here to access the map.

>>> Click here to access the Startup Ecosystem Rankings 2020 Report.

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.

>>> Click to view.

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.

>>> Click to view.

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.

>>> Click to view.

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.

>>> Click to view.

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.

>>> Click to learn more.

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.

>>> Click to learn more.

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.

>>> Click to learn more.

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.

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:

1. diving into programmatic challenges

2. refinement of problems to facilitate finding a solution

3. matching innovations, how they can be adapted

4. concluding with a basic project design you can build on for funding and implementation

The following challenges were identified and selected by the participants:

1. The low capacity of teachers leads to poor educational outcomes for children.

2. Traditional attitudes toward gender roles and attitude toward education lead to poor educational outcomes and high dropout rates.

3. 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

4. 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.

>>> Click to see the ecosystem & challenge maps

A pilot project called Adaptive Response Messaging (ARM) led by the Response Innovation Lab launched in Yemen between World Vision, Save the Children, and Oxfam on August 2020 to support coordinated preventative messaging across Yemeni social media platforms on COVID-19. The intent is a singular message being pushed by key NGO, Ministry, and local stakeholders with lifesaving information on household and community actions to prevent COVID-19 transmission. The pilot in Yemen is scaled off the ARM model established in Somalia in early 2020 in their COVID-19 response (which was able to reach large scale and endorsements across the Somali speaking region)

The Response Innovation Lab is an initiative led by World Vision globally, with Save the Children and Oxfam to support the integration of humanitarian innovation (global and local) into protracted and early onset emergencies worldwide. The Somali Response Innovation Lab is hosted by World Vision, under the SomRep Consortium (an association of NGOs operating in the response). The activities undertaken in Yemen are conducted as a pop-up lab in support of specific activities and led by the Somali Response Innovation Lab.

The ARM pilot in Yemen utilized two Somali media innovators to support the development of the videos based on their work with the Somali Response Innovation Lab around COVID-19 messaging. The Phase II of the ARM project in Yemen will localize the media content providers and establish a localized network to conduct ARM in further communication outreaches around COVID-19 and beyond.

As of December 2020, just three of the four videos had reached the eyes of over 108,000 + viewers. The Sana'a and Aden Governorates were having the most extensive viewership, but others stretch across Yemen.

To date, the following videos have been published:

• Personal Protective Equipment needed to combat COVID-19 and other illnesses

• Leila & Latif, is a child-focused puppet mini-series about two Superhero siblings that become protectors of their community against COVID-19 and other illnesses. Click to see the videos in Colloquial Yemeni Arabic / Classical Arabic)

• Handwashing short video targeted to kids

• Nutrition and Dietary Diversity, which touches on COVID-19, but is much broader around nutrition to prevent illness

• Physical Distancing (Arabic)

>>> Click to see the full repository

Response Innovation Lab worked with Save the Children’s Migration and Displacement Initiative (MDI) and their Predictive Displacement Project to host local Convener events - in Iraq and Jordan - around the development of a predictive analytics tool that will anticipate the scale and duration of conflict-driven displacement crises. At present, the lack of good data on the eventual scale and duration of forced displacement crises makes it difficult for humanitarian actors to efficiently and sustainably plan for early-stage interventions. Lack of demographical data also limits the efficiency and effectiveness with which they can plan for the specific needs of vulnerable groups within displaced populations. MDI seeks to use historical and contemporary data and machine learning to predict these characteristics of displacement, enabling better responses.

The use of predictive analytics in displacement work in the humanitarian sector has grown significantly amongst international organizations. However limited involvement or consultation has happened with field-level stakeholders. The convening events held with the Response Innovation Lab in Iraq and Jordan focus on identifying and gathering the perspectives and input of other potential end-users and other relevant stakeholders of predictive analytics tools, with Save the Children’s displacement model as an initial reference.

Particularly, the interest is in actors not well represented in typical discussions around predictive analytics in the humanitarian sector, such as

1. National and sub-national level actors working on displacement issues

2. Local and regional research and policy centers

3. Commercial actors with a stake in predicting population movements

The input of these actors will help shape the thinking for the third, external-facing phase of the project, and be a network through which to rollout other predictive tools. Learnings from the exercise will be shared with other humanitarian actors to similarly inform their work.

>>> Click to learn more.

The Puerto Rico RIL has fulfilled its initial mandate and closeout all Hurricane Maria activities. Working with our local host entity - The Puerto Rico Science Trust (PRST) - we have determined the same need and output of the RIL wouldn't be needed, especially as other activities within the PRST are filling current gaps. As of June 2020, we have sunset the Puerto Rico lab, which is a RIL success!

A principal of the RIL isn't to be around forever, but rather to fill a gap in the response ecosystem and build local capacity to respond. As we continue to expand with additional labs and pop-ups, we are thrilled to have worked through our first lab transition and exit strategy. We are excited to see PRST build on RIL activities, advance humanitarian innovation locally, and continue looking for ways to support their efforts across Puerto Rico.

>>> Click to see a full recap of the lab’s activities.