RIL at Humanitarian Networking and Partnerships Week, Geneva
Response Innovation Lab hosted a session on “The Missing Link: Connecting Community-Led Innovation Initiatives with National and Global Social Innovation Ecosystems in Humanitarian Settings“ in Geneva, on March 26.
RIL 2024 Year in Review
The highlights of Response Innovation Lab’s 2024, across the globe.
Deep Dive into RIL’s Workshop | Report from NW Syria Challenge Mapping Workshops
Recognising the challenge brought by food insecurity, the Syria Response Innovation Lab (RIL), in collaboration with Field Ready Middle East, World Vision Syria Response (WVSR), and the Food Security Cluster (FS Cluster), organized two back-to-back workshops—one in Gaziantep, Türkiye, and another in Northwest Syria at the RIL. These workshops provided a platform for frontline responders to voice challenges, exchange insights, and collaboratively design solutions, fostering local ownership.
Impact Video | RIL x OGOW Health
Watch the impact video telling the story of OGOW Health - supported by RIL - and how it contributes to heath care in Somalia.
Convener Report: WASH Challenge Mapping in NW Syria
How did we conduct the convener for challenge mapping in NW Syria? Read our full Convener Report to know more about how RIL works on the ground.
Explained in video: How do we generate & share evidence?
How do we generate and share evidence? Everything explained in one video!
Synthesis: Insights from RILx24
What are some less-discussed topics covered in RILx24? Have a look at our high-level overview of the key lessons learned.
Local Innovations for Nutrition Solutions Report
The Local Innovation Nutrition Solutions (LINS) project aimed to create viable business models to enable the sustainable demand of local nutritious foods in refugee-hosting communities in Uganda. The goal of LINS was to address underlying determinants of malnutrition in refugee children living in Kyaka II and Rhino refugee settlements through the analysis and testing of appropriate small-scale solutions and practices, developed through a human-centered design process. The process aimed to ensure high standards of quality and safety in complementary foods for improved nutrition and associated sustainable business and marketing models.
U-RIL hosts launch event for Entrepreneurship Support Organizations (ESOs) landscape analysis
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.
RILx23 Perspectives: Reflections on Humanitarian Innovation - Navigating New Frontiers, Partnerships, and Impact
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:
RILx23 Unveils Promising Outcomes and Strategic Insights
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.
Refugee-led Innovations in Uganda: the Innovations we Need
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.
Learning from a savings group digitisation pilot in Uganda
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.
Boosting interest in open source in Uganda
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.
Scale-up: Electronic Medical Record
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 Journey So Far
Five years ago, Response Innovation Lab launched its first platform in Jordan, kicking off an adventure that continues to prove exciting and essential to this day. To mark this milestone and the start of a new phase in our initiative, we wanted to share with you some of the most noteworthy accomplishments of our amazing colleagues and partners. Together, we have grown RIL into the largest network of field-based humanitarian innovation platforms in the world and have collectively demonstrated that decentralizing innovation processes, strengthening response-level ecosystems, promoting locally-developed solutions and encouraging horizontal scaling can improve humanitarian and “nexus” programming while also delivering on the promises of the Grand Bargain.
Local Innovations for Nutrition Solutions (LINS)
With the LINS project, RIL Uganda identified alternative solutions to the traditional distribution of free and imported nutritious foods (corn-soya blend/porridge) through a participative and competitive process.
Learn more about LINS here
In honor of World Refugee Day, check out these innovations...
Our labs are supporting several innovations that directly benefit refugee populations, learn more about these innovators and their pursuit to support their communities and others.
Op-Ed: The Rescuers - How emergencies turn local resources into transformative assets.
While this pandemic is not without precedent in human history, the novel coronavirus is, as it has fundamentally disrupted and changed our global systems. From history, we learn that during difficult and challenging times, the world and our communities innovate in unique and interesting ways. The stories that come to mind now are more of ad-hoc solutions to very immediate dangers. These tales of quick thinking and decisive action, as well as their aftermath, draw better parallels with the present that can help us see a new way forward.