The Hiddo & Hirsi educational videos are the first series of its kind for Somali-speaking children. Together, the innovator Poet Nation Media, the Somali Response Innovation Lab, and its local host World Vision Somalia developed a segment called Hiddo & Hirsi – the Protector Twins. These twins envision themselves as superheroes protecting their community from the Coronavirus and show how they deal with the challenges of closed school, psycho-social and mental health awareness, gender inclusivity and handicap representation, and much more!

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.

Khalid Hashi, founder of the Somali-based OGOW EMR health record innovation talks about the lessons he has learned as a social entrepreneur in a humanitarian setting.

Saul Kabali, who started as an intern at the Uganda Response Innovation Lab shares the 6 lessons he learned from his time at the lab, and how it has impacted the growth of his innovation - SafeBangle.

Written by Jodi Ashley Fleming, University of Copenhagen.

Collaborative private sector-INGO partnerships allow both organizations to combine their valuable expertise and create contextual innovative solutions for a humanitarian and community-based response; something more essential than ever as new types of crises emerge globally. This qualitative study investigated Ugandan private sector attitudes towards partnerships with INGOs to co-create community-based innovations.

A challenge faced by many refugees and rural community members in Uganda is the safety of saving money and the opportunities to access loans. Refugees frequently do not have access to banks, nor are they able to open bank accounts due to a lack of credit history or collateral. Not having a secure place to store money, makes saving challenging and risky. Akaboxi is tackling these problems straight on and transforming opportunities for financial service providers across Uganda.

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.

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

Pharx, an innovation supported by the Iraq Response Innovation Lab is highlight in The Guardian.

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.