A founding principle to RIL has always been the focus on strengthening local ecosystems to build resiliency and contextualized support for the response.
Response Innovation Lab initiative (RIL) has been closely linked to the Grand Bargain since its inception. The global RIL partnership began forming immediately in the wake of the World Humanitarian Summit of May 2016, under many of the same guiding principles and priorities aimed at opening up humanitarian systems to new actors and approaches. It is no coincidence that RIL’s three founding INGO partners - World Vision, Save the Children, and Oxfam - are also signatories to the Grand Bargain.
The current COVID-19 pandemic has been an unfortunate crisis to showcase the need for localization. As many of the global supply chains suffered due to the halt of transport, lockdown, and shelter-in orders, the local humanitarian ecosystem needed to respond to the building pandemic on their own. Gaps in the response system were quickly identified, and the importance of capacity building local ecosystems and actors have become ever so increasingly important.
The RIL’s field-first approach to strengthening response-level humanitarian innovation ecosystems so innovations can thrive in the response. This approach addresses many of the Grand Bargain’s nine goals and especially responds to the call for localization:
RIL Uganda 2018
Goal 1: Greater Transparency
The very first deliverable of all RIL country labs is the publication of a humanitarian innovation ecosystem map that makes it easy for all actors and stakeholders to identify organizations of all types (INGOs, CBOs, FBOs, national government agencies, UN, for-profits, academic, social enterprises, etc…) involved in the ongoing response and/or able to support said response through innovation. These maps are available publicly on RIL’s website. RIL will also make publicly available all meta-data on these ecosystems, including the types of responses encountered, the level of engagement of local actors, and the kind of innovations being proposed and piloted. A global registry of innovations is being compiled and will be made publicly available when ready.
Goal 2: More support and funding tools to local and national responders
Everything that RIL labs do on the ground is deliberately inclusive of local and national actors. Our Convener events aim to bring together responders of all stripes and provenance to define shared challenges and search for solutions. Our Matchmaker tool is a free service available to all actors that looks to link response implementers with available solutions to their challenges, preferably ones developed locally. Our Support function has been used to help local start-ups such as Akaboxi in Uganda and Sisitech in Kenya and Somalia pilot their ideas in collaboration with INGOs and national government agencies. RIL has also provided free training to local implementers and innovators on humanitarian ethics and has helped a number of these organizations apply for external funding. Our labs also help grassroots innovations gain wider attention and recognition through individual referrals and external communication support such as the Somali Innovation Spotlight.
Our model also calls for locally-led organizations to be part of our country's lab consortia. In Puerto Rico, our lab is entirely hosted by the Puerto Rico Science, Technology and Research Trust, while other labs have been collaborating with a range of local actors such as the Somali Disaster and Resilience Institute and Jordan’s largest civil society organization - Johud.
Goal 3: Increase the use and coordination of cash-based programming
While RIL has yet to support directly a Cash Transfer Programming (CTP) innovation, it has been advising the global Collaborative Cash Delivery partnership on how to set up a decentralized network of locally-managed consortia. Cash Working Groups have also engaged with RIL labs in Iraq and Jordan.
Goal 4: Improve joint and impartial needs assessments
While RIL has not yet been involved in traditional Needs Assessments (not surprisingly as it is not a direct implementer of relief programming), our labs do compile challenges to the delivery of humanitarian interventions through our Convener and MatchMaker functions, often working with the Cluster system to identify key barriers that need to be addressed throughout a given sector.
Goal 5: A Participation Revolution: Include people receiving aid in making the decisions that affect their lives
RIL strongly believes that field-based innovation processes in response contexts can be both rapid and ethical. All innovation pilots that receive direct support from RIL receive oversight from humanitarian specialists who can advise innovators on standards such as Sphere, CalP, and the CHS. Part of that technical assistance includes guidance on how to integrate human-centered design and accountability mechanisms into the development and testing of innovations. To help the sector as a whole apply and document these processes, RIL has developed a Humanitarian Innovation Evidence /MEAL Toolkit that is freely available on our website and is being used by a growing number of organizations.
Goal 6: Increase collaborative humanitarian multi-year planning and funding
RIL is a profoundly collaborative undertaking by design. In contrast with internal innovation labs that seek to incubate solutions within a single organization, RIL is set up as an open platform both at the local and global levels. RIL labs aim to create new partnerships between response implementers and innovators and help launch and scale innovations that work, regardless of where they come from.
Goal 7: Reduce the earmarking of donor contributions
Response Innovation Lab advocates both at the global and local levels for more flexible and innovation-friendly funding by donors and INGOs. In particular, RIL strongly believes that investments need to be made at the ecosystem level in order to help humanitarian organizations develop field-based innovations win partnerships with local actors. While the focus on delivering impact must be kept and respected, evidence shows that too few innovations are able to scale, even after successful pilots, in the absence of proper support mechanisms at the response level.
Goal 8: Harmonize and simplify reporting requirements
RIL is developing an internal registry of humanitarian innovation actors, challenges, connections, and projects that will be harmonized through our growing number of labs. We will make this information available to donors and other actors in the humanitarian space with the intent to help harmonize how information is presented throughout the sector.