Discover our Community-led Innovation Partnership
By Seema Kapoor (Innovation Manager, Elrha) and Alessandra Podestà (Innovation Learning Manager, Start Network)
Testing new ways of working has, during the past decade, become a priority and a need for the humanitarian and development sector. Our own organisations are being called to experiment, reflect, and demonstrate possible avenues to meaningfully shift from traditional, centralised, and hierarchical structures towards a more distributed and locally-led system. Community-led humanitarian innovation is, we believe, a critical and promising example of an effective approach to address the ever increasing humanitarian challenges in a more equitable and sustainable way.
As noted in the 2020 Global Humanitarian Overview, COVID-19 re-enforced what is already known to those working in protracted conflicts, such as Somalia and Syria — that local and community actors have the capacity and are actually better placed, with the right set of expertise to lead humanitarian response and programme delivery. The learning from these scenarios for international actors should be that shifting towards a model that supports community-led programming can work and is often more effective (The Global Humanitarian Overview, 2021 ; Begum R., Youssif El Tayeb, Sylwyn Sheen Alba, Megan Daigle, 2020). As we begin our community-led innovation journey, we recognise the pathway to change will not be smooth, but there will be constant learning and growth. Therefore, we want to share our experiences and reflections, with the hope that people facing the joys and challenges of similar journeys will find it useful.
Our Community-led Innovation Partnership (CLIP)
Our Community-led Innovation Partnership (CLIP) aims to support the emergence and development of locally-driven solutions to humanitarian problems, identified by people affected by crises. We support four initiatives in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guatemala, Indonesia and the Philippines to work with their communities along a journey to:
- Explore: Identify priority problem areas within communities;
- Discover: Identify and select ideas, solutions and community innovators;
- Develop: Support community innovators to develop and test their ideas;
- Grow: Support sustainability, uptake and scaling of solutions.
Our community-led approach seeks to ensure that innovative new solutions are produced that are contextually appropriate and locally-owned, making them more likely to be sustainable and impactful.
What is our approach?
We provide financial and non-financial support for innovation. This includes the resourcing of time and space for reflective inquiry, access to appropriate finance for solution development and scaling, facilitation of partnerships and networking opportunities, and other forms of technical and non-technical assistance.
We also recognise the importance of creating an enabling environment for innovation across the programme, including fostering support for a culture that is open to new ideas and diverse viewpoints, comfortable with uncertainty, and willing and able to embrace adaptive ways of working.
Who is part of it?
This is a partnership involving seven entities around the world who share a vision of supporting community-led innovation. These are: Elrha, Start Network, Asia Disaster Reduction and Response Network (supported by their Tokyo Innovation Hub), Yakkum Emergency Unit (Indonesia), the Center for Disaster Preparedness (the Philippines), Start Network Hub in DRC, and Start Network Hub in Guatemala, hosted by Asociación de Servicios Comunitarios de Salud (ASECSA).
We are keen to share our journey that speaks of our lived experiences and what we learn as we progress, transform, and adapt over the course of the partnership.
Our blogs will cover different themes and areas of our work that we find most important and relevant to others on similar journeys or about to commence one.
We want to use this platform to highlight the work and voices of communities and community actors, too. We view community-led innovation as a pathway to explore new ways of working and how to genuinely shift power to the communities, transform partnerships, and practise antiracism in our daily work.
We strive to use this space for honest reflection, engagement, and to challenge our assumptions and ourselves. We know we won’t have all the answers, but we are determined to start asking questions.
Welcome to our journey. Please, won’t you join us?
