UNDP Accelerator Labs, Honey Bee Network, and GIAN have jointly organized the first International annual competition for creative & innovative ideas or traditional knowledge practices around the world, which solve day-to-day problems. Life Shelter received this International Award among 2,500 solutions around the world.

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 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!

In Somalia, a challenge to the local health ecosystem was identified that there wasn’t a way for refugees and vulnerable populations to track their care or access care. An innovative solution was identified and needed support with piloting. The Somali Response Innovation Lab has been helping OGOW EMR with its first pilot. Click to learn about the impressive results.

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.

Amidst the challenges brought by the spread of COVID-19, one in particular has been the increased need for handwashing. The WASH sector has been working on access to hygiene for decades with some level of success; however six months into the global Coronavirus pandemic, nearly two billion people across the globe lack the soap and water needed to properly wash their hands. In Uganda, our partners at Engineers Without Borders – USA (EWB-USA) brought a challenge to the Response Innovation Lab:An effective soap dispensing solution was needed to accompany the handwashing stations in public spaces such as the busy Ntinda market.

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.

The challenge of understanding school attendance within Somalia has been ongoing for quite some time due to several reasons such as displacement of communities due to recurring disasters and lack of correct information regarding school children. There are some additional complications to this in cases where children may have similar names, or variations such as Muhammed or Muhammad. Although there is some record keeping, it is done sporadically and is inconsistent. In order to understand the causes of dropouts and the dynamics of variables like gender, there needs to be a more efficient and effective way of capturing and storing this data.

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.

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

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.