Why private partners are key to humanitarian innovation

According to the World Economic Forum, humanitarian needs will double over the next decade and require $50 billion to adequately cover response. To meet the needs of the world’s most vulnerable populations, humanitarian organizations like the International Rescue Committee must expand partnerships with the private sector. And as government commitments come under pressure and become more risk averse, companies, corporate foundations and private foundations have the opportunity to step up and lead in a big way.

We’ve seen this at the IRC through partnerships with the private sector that involve long-term, multi-year capacity building support and strategic commitments. These partners provide the type of risk capital and support that allow us to find new approaches to delivering aid and supporting displaced people, build evidence, and scale up what works.

Create space to fail fast and find pathways towards scale quickly.

Private sector investments have funded and fueled a number of humanitarian innovations that would not otherwise have taken place. At the Airbel Impact Lab, we have generated 60 potential solutions in areas like financing for humanitarian work, education, intimate partner violence, health, employment programming, and nutrition. Of these, we’ve prototyped 15 and tested 10. We’re currently conducting rigorous evaluations of 5, and planning for randomized control trials for at least 2 others in the near future. And we’re thinking about scale for all of our work.

This support has helped us launch Sprout, a project that aimed to find an effective way to prevent post-harvest loss and severe acute malnutrition (SAM) for subsistence farming families in Niger. When the team began exploring solutions, they created 16 ideas. Based on our set of criteria, they focused on tackling post-harvest loss, offering an alternative service to current storage practices that better protects against crop losses from rodents, insects, and fungus; and can offset the cost of operations as well. To further bolster the prototype, Sprout also experimented with two distinct approaches in combination with reducing post-harvest loss:

• Positive practices: Identifying and promoting existing practices in communities, like hand washing and diversifying the foods children eat, that are associated with SAM prevention, and then introducing choices for additional, relevant practices that women can decide to adopt. As well as supporting women in changing their ability, motivation, and opportunity to adopt or intensify positive practices.
• Cash: Providing modest quantities of unconditional cash to pregnant women and caregivers of children under 3 years to prompt the uptake of new behaviors, like eating (rather than selling) eggs or buying soap.

Now that the idea has moved beyond the prototype phase, we have found a path to continue working toward scale by integrating what we’ve learned into future malnutrition prevention efforts in the Sahel.

Part 1: Three Approaches We're Testing to Prevent Malnutrition

More capital for capacity building creates more discipline around innovation.

Private sector partners have provided the type of flexible capital that has allowed us to restructure how we invest in innovation.

“Capacity building is a key component of how we think about advancing the long-term health and mission of organizations we support,” says Dorothy Stuehmke, Senior Program Officer at Citi Foundation. “When we see how the Airbel Impact Lab went from a start-up within the IRC to becoming an integral part of its organizational strategy and operations, it reinforces our commitment to supporting an organization’s ability to innovate and thrive in a fast-changing world.”

With this capital, we were able to build the internal capacity needed in order to launch an Innovation Fund that enables the kind of creativity, curiosity, and risk-taking that are often made difficult by stringent reporting requirements and donor restrictions. In launching the Innovation Fund, we have built a governance structure, portfolio strategy, and set of indicators that we use to assess investments. It’s this exact type of flexible funding that has driven us to create discipline, close to the work that takes place. We’ve already funded a number of promising ideas with the fund, including:

• Micronutrient Cubes: A third of the 2 billion people who are micronutrient deficient are children. Many have little access to diverse foods or supplements. By working through private sector supply chains, this product will expand micronutrient access to caregivers in an easy-to-use form that mimics bouillon. The Innovation fund is supporting efforts to conduct field research and forge strong partnerships with other key public and private sector actors in the micronutrient space.
• Information Flows: Despite the fact that accessing accurate and timely information for those affected by crisis is crucial. It is often difficult to obtain. Through this line of work we are exploring how we can strengthen information flows, leverage social networks to seed and transmit information, and reduce misinformation to enable clients to make fully informed decisions. The Innovation fund enabled an ideation workshop with Signpost and Stanford Immigration Policy Lab, which elaborated potential areas for further investigation.

Private sector partners are crucial to delivering transformative outcomes for our clients

Working directly with private sector partners is crucial to scaling our interventions, designing sustainable, market-based solutions, and bringing different comparative advantages to the table to create innovative solutions. To highlight two examples:

• Social-emotional learning: Since 2017, the Airbel Center has partnered with Ubongo, Africa’s leading producer of edutainment media, to develop a family learning program called Tunakujenga or “We Build You Up” in Kiswahili in Tanzania. Building on Ubongo’s expertise in content for children that parents also enjoy watching — like the popular Tanzanian TV show Akili and Me — our partnership empowers parents to understand and practice social-emotional learning (SEL) and brain building activities at home with their children.

How to make learning fun and give parents more agency

• Project Match: Working to counter the high rates of unemployment that follow mass displacement in Jordan, Project Match has been testing a set of new innovations for placing vulnerable populations and refugees in jobs. In this program, we work directly with Jordanian manufacturing firms to understand their needs, preferences and concerns as it relates to labor market recruitment. By working directly with a number of firms, we’ve been able to more effectively link refugees and vulnerable Jordanians with employment opportunities. This project is being implemented in partnership with the Government of Jordan and Oxford University.

Some of the greatest minds in business and philanthropy have been refugees at some point in their lives or sons and daughters of them — just look at the leaders of Intel, Google, and Apple. At Airbel, we continue to seek out innovative ways to partner with companies and foundations to drive new ways of doing business in the humanitarian sector, with the ultimate goal of helping people affected by conflict and crisis to survive, thrive, and regain control of their future.