This 90-minute session will explore the current social innovation ecosystem and pathways between local communities in areas affected by crisis and the national humanitarian and innovation hubs. Research continues to demonstrate that the humanitarian system faces great difficulties in scaling innovations in both bottom-up and top-down directions. While the reasons are many and complex, one key facet of the issue has received relatively little attention, to wit the lack of a coherent, specialized pathway between communities and national social and humanitarian innovation platforms. This gap in the chain makes it unlikely that community-led solutions can scale out to non-adjacent populations, difficult for external innovators to engage with affected users/customers, and complicated for national or global innovations to reach the last mile. A range of actors, however, are stepping up to fill this gap, including subnational social innovation or entrepreneurship hubs, innovation-friendly civil society networks, civic entrepreneur-led funding platforms and more agile government structures among others.

This session will use panel discussions, presentations and interactive exercises to explore these themes and identify what smart investments can be made to better connect the different levels of the system so that innovators of all types can deliver more impact at scale.

Objectives

1. Increase awareness of humanitarian innovation ecosystems and the type of actors that inhabit them at various levels

2. Develop a clearer understanding of the gaps in current systems and what their impact on the scaling potential of social innovations of all types might be

3. Explore how solutions from community-led innovation programs can more easily scale to new populations

4. Identify key potential investments the humanitarian system can make to enable the development of more and stronger subnational social innovation support structures.

Session Plan

Response Innovation Lab will draw on its ecosystem mapping work performed in several countries around the world to define the general gap in subnational structures able to link the hyper-local and national or response-level systems but also the organic rise of such platforms, providing specific examples from Uganda, Somalia and Iraq.

Elrha will present findings from their upcoming paper on the scaling success and challenges stemming from the Community-Led Innovation Project (CLIP) they are implementing across multiple countries.

Creating Hope in Conflict: A Humanitarian Grand Challenge will share lessons from their recent paper on supporting innovation in conflict-affected settings, and showcase ground-breaking local innovations who are striving to create transformative change across the humanitarian sector.

The panel discussion will feature guest speakers from multiple levels of the ecosystem, including:

1. A representative from Civic to showcase their civic entrepreneurship work and the investments made in locally-led funding mechanisms for social innovators in Ukraine and Syria;

2. A representative from Response Innovation Lab Uganda (or Somalia) to highlight their work in identifying and supporting innovation hubs and Entrepreneurship Support Organizations (ESOs) outside of Kampala;

3. A representative from Danish Refugee Council to demonstrate how they as an INGO approach the replication and scaling of community-led innovations they foster through their projects

4. A representative from the Center for Disaster Preparedness in the Philippines to demonstrate how locally-led networks of NGOs and innovation-friendly government policies can help connect communities with innovation systems and resources

5. A representative from the Humanitarian Innovation Program of Innovation Norway to speak on how their funded projects are driving uptake by new communities beyond the initial pilot areas.

6. Representatives from CHIC-supported innovations will showcase how their projects are driving change across the sector.

The panel discussions will field questions based on the session objectives listed above as well as participate in a Q&A from the audience. Polling software will be used to capture feedback on some of the key recommendations highlighted by the panelists before the closing of the session.

Target Audience

This session should appeal to HNPW participants with an interest in the localization of humanitarian systems and in innovation as an enabling factor.