Somali Response Innovation in collaboration with ADRA, successfully hosted the Financial Innovation and Resource Mobilization project’s (FIRM) Learning Event, funded by Innovation Norway, under the theme “From Pilot to Practice: Innovative Financing—Promoting Locally Led, Impact-Driven Co-Creation on Evidence and Transitioning Innovations to Market-Wide Application.”

On January 6, the Somali Response Innovation Lab (SomRIL) hosted a national-level Humanitarian Research & Innovation Futures Consultation in Mogadishu , convening a diverse cross-section of Somalia’s humanitarian ecosystem to collectively shape a forward-looking, nationally grounded agenda for humanitarian research and innovation.

Using Elhra’s Humanitarian Research & Innovation Futures Toolkit, the consultation applied strategic foresight methods to examine key drivers of change, surface critical uncertainties, and stress-test existing humanitarian approaches—ensuring future responses remain adaptive, evidence-driven, and locally relevant.

Bilow Capital is an innovation project supported by the Somali Response Innovation Lab through the FIRM Challenge 2024. In this piece, Co-founder and General Partner Hana Kaise Abdi—also a speaker at RILx25 on the “Local Innovation Ecosystems” panel—shares her insights on what it takes for a local innovation ecosystem to truly thrive.

Watch the recording of the IGNITE Food Systems Challenge Demo Day to hear from the innovators: an opportunity for you to take away the lessons learned from our community innovators and gain insights on Somalia’s food systems!

As StartupBlink’s Ecosystem Partner, Somali Response Innovation Lab is happy to share that Somalia reclaims its spot in the Global Top 100 Startup Ecosystem, ranked by StartupBlink in 2025. Somalia now ranks 13th place in Africa and 4th in Eastern Africa!

The highlights of Response Innovation Lab’s 2024, across the globe.

Watch the impact video telling the story of OGOW Health - supported by RIL - and how it contributes to heath care in Somalia.

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.

The Response Innovation Lab (RIL) has developed an Innovation M&E Toolkit to gather evidence around humanitarian innovations to better understand whether it’s having the desired positive impact. 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.

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 a crisis, such as COVID-19.

Somali RIL has been working with the innovators Sisitech to further develop the Digital Attendance App to support World Visions supported schools across Somalia with better tracking, supporting, and communicating attendance and outcomes to parents, districts, and the government.

The challenge of understanding school attendance within Somalia has been ongoing for quite some time due to several reasons such as displacement of communities due to recurring disasters and lack of correct information regarding school children. There are some additional complications to this in cases where children may have similar names, or variations such as Muhammed or Muhammad. Although there is some record keeping, it is done sporadically and is inconsistent. In order to understand the causes of dropouts and the dynamics of variables like gender, there needs to be a more efficient and effective way of capturing and storing this data.

A short video to showcase RIL’s M&E tool in Somalia gathering evidence around an educational pilot case study of the Digital Attendance Application (DAA) education pilot with World Vision.

The Somali RIL presented on the collaborative public-private approach in building partnerships and leverage humanitarian mechanisms in the co-creation of public health messaging products that are open-sourced, and therefore quickly scaled to build a national prevention response campaign to COVID-19.

See what each of the labs is doing to prevent and fight COVID-19 in their responses.

A deep dive into the solution identification and piloting of an app, to meet an education challenge in Somalia.