RILx24 has successfully concluded! Hosted by World Vision Nepal and Nepal Innovation Lab, we organized the 2024 edition of the annual RILx event. This year, we gathered in Kathmandu, Nepal from September 17-19, and welcomed over 200 guests from 60 agencies coming from 25 different countries!

Together with Majlisna - Civic Jordan, we successfully hosted our first Thoughtcast session in Jordan to discuss what NGOs need from entrepreneurs and what entrepreneurs can offer. We welcomed participants from international and local NGOs, social business, academia, and tech and innovation sectors for fruitful exchanges!

Together with Majlisna - Civic Jordan, our first Thoughtcast session, "Bridging the Gap: What NGOs Need from Entrepreneurs and What Entrepreneurs Can Offer”, is happening this Saturday the 31st of August!

We’re preparing for our first "Challenge Mapping" exercise, and we need your help to identify the critical challenges faced in the WASH sector. Your feedback will guide our efforts and ensure they are as impactful as possible.

This will be an opportunity for startups and innovators to connect with NGOs and leverage their skills to provide impactful solutions. We’re planning informal, topic-driven networking gatherings where meaningful conversations and collaborations can flourish.

On May 30, 2024, in Gaziantep, Turkey, we officially launched the Northwest Syria Response Innovation Lab (NW Syria RIL). This initiative, led by World Vision International and the Response Innovation Lab (RIL), is set to transform humanitarian response in Northwest Syria, particularly in the aftermath of the 2023 earthquakes.

The global Response Innovation Lab partnership is proud to welcome Danish Refugee Council as its newest Member. DRC has joined founding partners World Vision International, Save the Children International, Oxfam International and Civic to help further RIL’s mission to transform response innovation ecosystems in humanitarian contexts. DRC’s singular focus on displacement programming and community empowerment will help drive our programme to further explore how grassroots level innovation initiatives can better connect with response-level humanitarian innovation systems so that community-led solutions can impact populations at scale.

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.

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:

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.

Response Innovation Lab is preparing its most high profile event to date — RILx23. The event will take place in Nairobi on June 12-15 under the theme of New Frontiers in humanitarian innovation partnerships.

We are very excited to announce that the Smart Communities Coalition and Response Innovation Lab have decided to join forces and merge. The Coalition will join our network to become RIL’s private sector convening arm.

In 2021, the SomRIL partnered with the Internet of Production Alliance (IOPA), and two of their members, Field Ready and Humanitarian Open Street Maps. This was around the Open Know Where (OKW) standards that were just released in 2021 to help standardize the mapping of factories to promote local manufacturing. We conducted a small pilot together with World Vision, Oxfam, the Somaliland Chamber of Commerce and the SIMAD iLab to map factories in Mogadishu and Hargeisa. We also had the standards translated into Somali. You can see these materials here: https://www.internetofproduction.org/open-know-where

The SomRIL supported the SIMAD iLab to host the Global Goals Jam in Mogadishu in September, 2021. This event looked to using design thinking to address challenges in Somalia around achieving the SDGs.

In December, 2021, the SomRIL supported iRise as they organized the 3rd Mogadishu Tech Summit. We were able to organize 2 panel discussions. The first was on health innovations, and we facilitated the participation of Khalid, the founder and CEO of OGOW Health, and Sahra, the co-founder and CEO of Hello Caafi. The second was on innovations in the education sector where we facilitated the participation of World Vision, Save the Children, the Puntland MoE and Sisitech, to talk about the importance of public-private partnership and collaboration around the digital attendance pilot.

In 2019, the RIL co-convened an event with the Somali Food Security Cluster to better understand the challenges in the sector. One challenge that emerged was around the sustainability of agriculture capacity in local institutions. The pandemic delayed the progression of this MatchMaker submission, but in 2021 the SomRIL was able to partner with the SomReP consortium, the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation, and the Somali National University (SNU). This partnership and pilot is still unfolding, but the intent is for the SomReP to share their climate smart agriculture modules, have them endorsed by the MoAI, and then to develop a curriculum for the SNU to own and to offer to NGOs and others.

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.

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.

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.