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How Humanitarian Innovation Can Help Transform The Lives Of The Poorest

Credits: EU/ECHO Malini Morzaria on Flickr

Federico Guerrini

Contributor, Forbes.com

The landscape of humanitarian action has changed significantly, lately, and not for the best. In the last 10 years, the number of people affected by humanitarian crisis has almost doubled, and the cost of humanitarian assistance has more than tripled.

The needs and conditions of the people affected have also changed. As Oxford scholars Alexander Betts and Louise Bloom explain in their recent paper “Humanitarian Innovation: the state of the art“, while in the past most of the refugees lived in rural camps, more than half of them live now in urban areas.

The average period of displacement is also much longer now: as much as 17 years, according to the UNHCR. No wonder NGOs and governments are struggling to cope with this situation. The humanitarian ecosystem needs to change, to improve and evolve, and “innovaton” is one of the keywords of this process: “Transformation through Innovation” will be one of four themes of the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit.

Innovation, here, is not only technological (although new technologies do play an important role): rather, the term is defined as “a means of adaptation and improvement through finding and scaling solutions to problems, in the forms of products, processes or wider business models”.

What does this mean? Let’s consider the last part of the sentence first. In a market that’s traditionally been closed and predominantly funded by the inter-governmental public sector, demands for a new business model are emerging, that takes into account the engagement of the private sector, through partneships, direct involvement or other means.

Large corporations like IKEA , Deloitte and Ericsson have already understood that this is also in their interest, partly in the name of corporate social responsibility, partly because humanitarian crisis put at risk their offices, supply chains and staff.

Ericsson, for instance, works with Refugees United and other partners, to help Syrian families, displaced in Jordan, Iraq and Turkey, reconnect.

Others hope that solutions proven to work in a disaster, could be commercialized for the two billion people who live with less than US$2 per day. Often these products were born initially for camping, hiking or military use, but sometimes they are designed together by private companies and academic institutions instead, like the new UNCHR shelter developed in partnership with the IKEA foundation.

Designing a better home for refugees, inspired by IKEA and financed by IKEA Foundation

It’s not only multinationals which are operating in this field. “We’ve seen we’ve got lots of startup entrepreneurs, smaller tech companies, who are also interested using their technologies and ideas for the humanitarian sector,” Bloom tells me. “There is an opportunity for cross‑fertilization of ideas.”

And there are some best practices to take inspiration from, some dating back as early as the ’90s. It was then that an NGO called Potters for Peace started to work with local potters in Central America to develop ceramic water filters that are thought to remove 99.88% of water borne disease agents.

Though not built specifically for emergency response, these filters soon gauged the interest of Universities and of humanitarian institutions and found their place in the humanitarian ecosystem: they are now produced at over 50 independent factories in more than 30 countries. Point of strenghts of this project are the relatively low investment needed makes the manufacturing process accessible and replicable, the use of local skills and locally available materials and the affordable price of the final product.

A more high-tech solution for the same problem, is the LifeSaver Cube, a water filtration product born in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami. It can carry up to 5L of water which is filtered and sterilized through the use of an inbuilt hand pump. LifeSaver Systems, based in the UK, is a private company; but the national Department for International Development and Oxfam were consulted during the development of the product, another example of how a for-profit organization can work together with the third sector to reach a common goal.

Other fascinating examples of collaboration between the private sector, the academia, governments and NGOs, have more to do with process innovation. The Cash Learning Partnership, for instance, formed by the British Red Cross, Save the Children, Oxfam GB and other partners, aims to promote appropriate, timely and quality cash and voucher programming in humanitarian response. Credit card company Visa V +1.1% is providing technical support, assisting the CaLP with the delivery of electronic vouchers using Visa prepaid cards.

Generally speaking, the inclusion of private organizations within the humanitarian system, could help foster a more entrepreneurial approach in a sector which has traditionally been risk averse. But, of course, it’s much easier to say this, than feed it into practice.

First of all because of the existing power asymmetries between those providing protection or aid and those in need of that assistance; humanitarian workers must ensure that solutions really meet the needs of the affected populations, rather than being top‑down or being driven by where the money is coming from.

Also, while in Silicon Valley companies are used to value failure as a necessary step before succeeding, you can’t adopt the same “fail-fast, fail often” mantra in humanitarian innovation: the stakes are simply too high. You can easily fix a bad product; you can’t do the same with a broken family or a devastated country.

That’s exactly what troubles some observers of the, for other aspects laudable, Facebook’s project of bringing Internet access to the developing world. You can’t just experiment with poor people, giving them the chance to connect even if they have almost nothing to eat, and see what happens. Or, can you?

This is a small example of the tension that will likely spring up in the next years between the old, conservative way of doing good, and new approaches that could take a lot of opportunities with them, but also new risks and ethical dilemmas. Still, as Betts and Bloom conclude in their paper, “innovation is already and irreversibly part of the humanitarian system.” The hope is that in the future, by creating shared definitions and principles, identifying good practices, and lifting barriers to ethical innovation, researchers say, humanitarian actors will be more prepared to meet the challenges of our increasingly troubled world.

Originally published in Forbes.com