Innovating with and for people forced to flee
With record numbers of people forced to flee around the world while humanitarian resources continue to shrink, innovative solutions are more essential than ever to address pressing humanitarian challenges.
The Innovation Service supports UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, in finding truly transformational ways of solving these challenges by ensuring colleagues as well as forcibly displaced and stateless communities are equipped with the funding, expert guidance, and training they need to explore innovative solutions.
Our mission
The Innovation Service nurtures a culture of innovation at UNHCR by offering a structured model to identify, pilot, accelerate, and scale sustainable solutions that deliver lasting positive change for and with refugees.
From combating erosion in refugee camps to orchestrating a global system for forecasting forced displacement, the Service supports the development of both refugee-facing and internal-facing solutions. It does so primarily through five Innovation Programmes, which cover key thematics:
By providing holistic support for the testing and implementation of forward-thinking ideas, the Service ensures UNHCR can deliver a humanitarian response fit for the future.
Evolving innovation
UNHCR Innovation began in 2012, with division-specific innovation labs, before consolidating into a single Innovation Service in 2017.
Our regional innovation focal points enable us to keep pace with evolving realities and needs at the regional and country level, and we work closely with many other divisions and offices within UNHCR to support and incentivize innovation across the organization.
Our unique approach
The Innovation Service is supporting projects around the world that are testing new approaches to solving long-standing challenges.
Of our five priority programmes, four feature Innovation Funds that provide technical and financial support to UNHCR teams and refugees piloting innovative solutions. The Funds serve as UNHCR’s primary mechanism for crowdsourcing and incubating innovative solutions. They operate on an annual cycle, with a competitive, inclusive, and merit-based selection process.
Community cleanup of a unique mangrove ecosystem in Turbo, Colombia, as part of a pilot supported by the Environment and Climate Action Innovation Fund.
Some of the projects endorsed for support through these Funds are responding to a specific need; they’re delivering a solution that will be useful for that context, complementing broader work, and/or learning lessons that could help UNHCR colleagues and other humanitarian actors deliver different but related initiatives. Other projects are testing ideas that, if successful, could scale globally and change the way UNHCR delivers humanitarian aid.
Some of these projects don’t succeed, or don’t succeed in the way they were expected to – and that’s also essential to innovation. Failure is a key part of the experimentation process, driving iteration, enhancement, and learning. By not being afraid of failure, we’re free to break new ground, documenting processes and lessons as we go.
Our team
The Innovation Service is a lean and diverse team, with women holding the majority of leadership positions. The team’s professional profile is perfectly aligned to its approach, with most teammates being experts in both humanitarian programme delivery and a relevant technical area, such as data science, law, environmental science, or gender equality. Having a geographically dispersed team means we’re better informed about regional and local contexts and well positioned to support innovations that are tailored to and implemented in those contexts.
Innovating together
Our work is made possible by diverse and valued partnerships. We collaborate closely with UNHCR teams around the world and with forcibly displaced and stateless communities to implement cutting-edge ideas that are tailored to local contexts and urgent challenges.
This approach is, in turn, facilitated by partnerships that provide support for innovation – be it funding, technical expertise, data, or other material and nonmaterial support – and generate mutual benefits. The national governments and private sector companies we collaborate with are value aligned while bringing different worldviews and expertise to the table. These partnerships range from financial donations to in-kind assistance and innovative skillshare programmes.
Get in touch to support our work!
For general UNHCR Innovation enquiries, please email us at: [email protected]