How Humanitarian Innovation
Can Help Transform The Lives Of The Poorest
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Credits:
EU/ECHO Malini Morzaria on Flickr
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Federico Guerrini
Contributor, Forbes.com
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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.
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Designing a better home for refugees, inspired by IKEA
and financed by IKEA Foundation
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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
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