Over the course of four months, the RIL Central Support Unit worked with the Save the Children Sudan Country Office to help its team and partners apply innovation processes to four challenges that they had identified.

In 2020-2021, RIL further supported investment in this field by facilitating the 3rd call of the Dutch Relief Alliance Innovation Fund – allowing an investment of EUR 2 million in locally-led innovative proposals. See more about this locally-driven approach to funding innovation and the great solutions that emerged here.

RIL Uganda runs a Learning Hub for the refugee response actors and has supported them to learn and uptake best practices around: the Refugee Engagement Forum- Learn more about U-Learn here

Innovation hubs are connecting young entrepreneurs, programmers, designers, and investors and facilitating growth and collaborations across the innovation ecosystem. The Response Innovation Lab has set up an interactive platform to empower innovators with innovation support which highlights innovation hubs, accelerators, and co-working space’s location and hours.

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.

On February 27th, 2020, the Response Innovation Lab (RIL), along with the SomReP and BRCiS consortiums co-hosted a session at the Sankalp Forum’s 7th Africa Summit in Nairobi, Kenya. The session showcased that despite the challenges in Somalia, there are many opportunities for innovation, partnership, and investment.

Response Innovation Lab has collaborated with Briter Bridges to visualize the state of educational technology across some of the major African technology ecosystems.