Outbreak Preparedness & Response
The ongoing Ebola outbreak in DRC and Uganda hits close to home — these are contexts where RIL has active projects and deep partnerships. It speaks directly to what RIL exists to do: support the humanitarian system to respond better, faster, and more effectively. This page brings together innovations and resources from our work: a curation of lessons learned that we hope will be useful to the wider response community.
Innovation | Adaptive Response Messaging (ARM)
The Challenges It Tackles: Typically, during responses, many different actors —Government, NGOs, INGOs, Civil Society, and multi-lateral institutions—are sending out uncoordinated messaging around prominent issues that affect their lives. In addition, at times, myths of what can and cannot be done emerge sometimes born out of fear, misinformation, or cultural and religious ideas.
The Solution: The ARM is a “process” innovation model and establishes a new way of coordinated response-time messaging that applies. The process establishes a singular focused message broadcast across multiple mediums through multiple partners, thus the messaging is unbranded to remove any barriers. Additionally, messages are targeted to key messages for particular messaging groups called “narrowcasting”. As the messages are broadcast across multiple mediums, through many partners, the audiences hear a singular voice on messaging both for prevention, actions, and response.
Prize | The COVID-19 Innovation Prize
The Challenges: Uganda's COVID-19 outbreak and prolonged lockdown have compounded existing vulnerabilities across refugee and host communities, disrupting education for millions of children, decimating livelihoods, and exposing the most marginalised groups — including women, children, and persons with disabilities — to heightened risks of violence, exploitation, and psychological distress. With communities living in hard-to-reach areas and limited resources available, the need for innovative, locally-driven responses is urgent. Ugandan and refugee communities, alongside a thriving civil society and innovation ecosystem, are well-placed to develop effective solutions.
The Response: In response to these challenges and recognizing the potential in the ecosystem, the Response Innovation Lab Uganda (RIL), in collaboration with Save the Children and with the support of the Government of Norway, launched a Covid-19 Innovation Prize for 2020. The project aimed to support locally-sourced innovations responding to the pandemic (prevention and treatment), secondary socio-economic challenges, and disruption of basic services caused by the virus or the preventive measures in place to flatten the curve. Click on the “Learn More” below to check out the proven innovations selected and featured under the project.