Community-Led Innovation — Three Years of Learning

Launched in 2020, the Community-Led Innovation Partnership (CLIP) programme is a collaboration initiative that has brought together a group of like-minded humanitarian innovation actors, to explore how communities can be placed at the heart of the humanitarian response.

The initiative has been notably unique for two key reasons…

Firstly, the approach and philosophy that underpins the CLIP — which builds on the Start Network’s Depp Innovation Labs programme and incorporates the innovation knowledge and experience of Elrha and ADRRN — is intentionally focused on deviating from the dominant humanitarian innovation narrative of tech-based solutions and output-oriented scaling ambitions. The CLIP instead focuses on innovation as a process, and looks at how communities can be supported to unlock their own problem-solving and creativity skills, facilitated to design their own solutions, and become innovation champions in their own context.

Secondly, as an equal partnership of 6 diverse organisations (Elrha, Start Network, ADRRN, ASECSA, CDP, YEU) working across three different countries (Guatemala, Indonesia and Philippines), where everyone has an equal say and influence on the programme decision-making and strategy, we also actively celebrate and embrace the differences and contextual elements of each country’s model. From the very beginning of the programme, learning from — and with — each other has been a core ambition of the CLIP. Global organisations, national leads, and community innovators have all been encouraged and supported to reflect on their own ways of working and to learn from those working in different contexts. Equally, innovators and country leads are not expected to approach their work in a globally-uniform way, and are instead encouraged to design their own programmes in a way that respects and aligns with their own context.

In April 2023, the first phase of the CLIP officially came to an end and — with the support of Catalystas Consulting who have carried out an external evaluation — we have now taken some time to pause, look back, and reflect on the past three years. As we are about to embark on the next two years of this programme, what have we achieved, what have we learnt so far?

Since 2020, three community-led innovation initiatives have been established and developed in Guatemala, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The three models all reflect the characteristics of the communities they work with and the unique problems they are dealing with. The CLIP is not just one model — our partners are testing out a variety of approaches. We’re not looking for the single best model, but instead we’re exploring what works best in a given context.

In Guatemala, ASECSA is exploring community-led innovation with Mayan indigenous communities, and has developed an innovation model that is linked to Mayan cosmovision principles and indigenous knowledge. YEU in Indonesia has focused instead on how to create an inclusive, community-led innovation approach, where older people and people with disabilities can be actively included in the humanitarian response process. In the Philippines, CDP has established the Pinnovation Academy, a collective of regional innovation hubs which aim to support the development and incorporation of community-based innovations in regional and national disaster risk reduction processes and frameworks.

Overall, the three initiatives received over 90 innovative ideas from their own communities, and then from these, selected 46 community innovator teams to support. The innovations all aim to address a wide variety of diverse challenges, such as the effects of climate change, inclusion in DRR, food security, and livelihood support. Innovators — who in most cases were taking part in an innovation ideation process for the first time — received a combination of financial and non-financial support on idea development, prototyping, business and financial skills, partnership brokering, and learning and iteration based on communities’ feedback (read here about the different selection processes of the three country initiatives). The 46 ideas are still active, and the most promising innovations will now work to further refine their sustainability and growth plans.

Facilitating the emergence and development of community innovations has been an incredibly fulfilling experience, though has not always been easy. We have had to pivot and challenge our initial assumptions many times.

Traditional social or humanitarian innovation methods and approaches have needed to be adapted to individual contexts, to build on — rather than replace — local or indigenous knowledge. The often Western-centric and “Silicon Valley” innovation methods that have inspired humanitarian innovation for almost a decade, such as human-centred design and design thinking approaches, are extremely valuable tools in supporting the transition to a more locally-led humanitarian system, but must be contextualised and made relevant to community innovators’ needs. We are now on a journey to make the understanding of innovation, and its related processes, even more inclusive and relevant to communities. (Read our research into the meanings of humanitarian innovation).

When it comes to supporting and encouraging innovations with their growth and journey to scale, we have had to rethink our own understanding of “scaling”, to understand what this really means from the perspective of community-based and grassroot innovators. We have learnt that “scaling up or out” aren’t the only indicators of a successful innovation, and that ensuring community ownership and local sustainability are equally important in creating long-lasting social impact and increasing communities’ resilience to crises. Over the next two years, we are committed to a further exploration of what “scaling” really means in the context of the CLIP, and what community-led and ethical scaling might look like in practice.

We have also begun to explore the understanding that — to achieve a longer-term impact — it is crucial to look beyond the learnings of individual innovation products and single solutions. Community-led innovation is, above all, an innovation process, where unlocking the innovation mindset and agency of local communities should be the main goal. Exploring ways to link together all of the different innovations that emerge within a community, while working towards catalysing grassroots solutions to complex problems, is a key priority for us moving forward. To achieve this, we will need to identify and work with more collaborators and allies, both within and outside of the humanitarian sector.

As we look back and celebrate all of the amazing achievements of local innovation teams so far, we are also preparing to start the second stage of our journey, which will see another country and context added to the partnership, South Sudan. We will continue to share insights and learnings with as many humanitarian actors as possible, so that more may embark on similar adventures, in moving away from linear, top-down humanitarian programmes, in favour of user-centred approaches which support crisis-affected communities to develop — and sustain — their own solutions.