How local leadership makes decision-making more relevant and contextually appropriate for humanitarian innovation
By Alessandra Podestà (Innovation Learning Manager, Start Network) and Seema Kapoor (Innovation Manager, Elrha)
Part of the Community-Led Innovation Partnership (CLIP) journey this past year was to explore and understand ways of shifting decision making power on the allocation of funding and resources to where it belongs — with locally-led partners and the communities they work with.
Historically in the humanitarian sector, the majority of decision making for programmes has been made by funders and committees based in the global North. The humanitarian innovation agenda has also been Northern-centric, focused on the adoption of tools and methodologies from the global North to humanitarian contexts without necessarily interrogating their pertinence and purpose.
The CLIP was established with a foundational belief that humanitarian solutions will be more impactful and sustainable if they are culturally and contextually appropriate — and appropriateness is best achieved through leadership and decision making by affected communities and locally-led organisations.
To that end, the CLIP’s three locally-led partners, CDP, ASECSA and YEU, embarked on a process of designing their own discovery and selection processes to identify innovative individuals, ideas and solutions within their communities. They carefully and thoughtfully designed each step of the process to ensure that they responded to problems identified by the communities and supported appropriate responses. The selection process is part of a learning journey for the entire partnership, and we are excited to share reflections and learning from each partner.
CDP, the Philippines: Valuing all stakeholders in decision-making
CDP prioritised inclusive decision-making in their selection process design. This meant innovators were given space to share their innovations with a large variety of stakeholders, but also resulted in a time-intensive process. The most influential part of decision making (45% weight) was the community review, where members of the community were invited to hear a pitch and pose questions to the innovators. This aimed to gauge the viability and adaptability of the innovation within the context of the community where it would be tested. The innovators also evaluated each other’s proposals and were assessed by technical experts from the Philippines. Finally, CDP felt that it was important to ensure buy-in from national and international stakeholders, so key partners conducted a final stage ranking based on a shortlist of projects resulting from the community, peer and technical reviews. This process overall will take 4 months.
A key lesson from CDP’s unique design is that including all stakeholders — the community, the innovators, technical experts in country, national, and international partners — is complex and time consuming. But if done properly, it offers the opportunity to bring along all stakeholders on this journey and can serve a dual purpose for advocacy and building future partnerships.
ASECSA, Guatemala: Searching for innovators, not innovations
ASECSA deployed a selection process that aimed to be fully led by the communities they work with. Instead of inviting proposals for innovations, they focused on finding the right people with demonstrated motivation and willingness to form a team and innovate together. After extensive community engagement and problem definition activities, ASECSA facilitated brainstorming sessions using participatory art methods to prioritise community needs, generate ideas and identify potential solutions. These sessions were open to all community members and local community groups (e.g. churches, youth groups, women’s groups associations), who formed their own teams based on their interests, experiences and motivations. The process aimed to (1) be as inclusive as possible giving the chance to participate to a diverse range of individuals, including those who normally sit at the margins of the community, and (2) ensure that decision-making was owned by the community as much as possible. The final winning teams were then selected by a committee made of representatives from across the community including community structures such as COCODE (Consejos Comunitarios de Desarrollo Urbano y Rural) and a member of the ASECSA team, according to criteria including motivation of team members, potential benefit for the community, and viability and sustainability of the idea.
This organic and flexible way of forming innovation teams recognizes the importance to successful innovation of building teams made up of diverse participants who are strongly motivated to solve a problem and demonstrate strong empathy with others facing the problem.
Although not without its own challenges of managing communities’ expectations, ASECSA’s selection process aims to be fully led by the communities they work with, creating participatory, horizontal relations where all voices are heard. Their approach requires great effort and time spent in community engagement work, but ensures deep and lasting engagement, and has shown that when communities are given the right time and space, they can find the right solutions and carry them forward.
Yakkum Emergency Unit: Local selection with support for skills building
YEU placed a strong focus on inclusion of people with disabilities and older people in humanitarian action. In April 2021 they opened a month-long call for proposals for innovation ideas aimed at supporting inclusion. They received 43 concept notes from innovation teams from community-based organisations, community groups (e.g. women’s groups, older people’s groups, church communities, art community), local NGOs, and academia. After the initial screening, innovator teams participated in a series of workshops facilitated by YEU which focused on supporting them to develop their ideas further. Innovators were also supported to conduct problem research, including root cause analysis, knowledge mapping and actor mapping, and user research, including focus groups and interview discussions to ensure the innovations were informed by community needs and knowledge.
Towards the end of the idea development phase, YEU provided pitching training to further strengthen the skills and capacities of the innovators and support them to communicate their ideas clearly before the final selection. A Demo Day event was then organised to pick the 10 final teams. National and local government experts, CSOs, media and private sector representatives all attended the Demo Day which not only had the goal of picking the final teams but was designed to explore possible opportunities for collaborations and support from various stakeholders as partners, investors, or potential networks.
The selection process designed by YEU was thorough and required a long timeframe. Despite a lengthy process, the series of workshops and capacity development support were an essential part of the success and inclusivity of the entire process.
What key learnings can be drawn for humanitarian innovation practitioners and other organisations putting efforts in supporting community-led innovation?
Localising humanitarian innovation goes beyond funding innovators locally but starts with deep community engagement and ensuring the innovation cycle is led by people who are part of those communities. The selection processes described above are strongly linked to community engagement and local contexts, but also reflect some of the challenges and learning of balancing expectations from communities whilst managing the innovation initiative.
The three selection processes all offer valuable lessons in identifying and generating ideas. They demonstrate that meaningfully involving communities in humanitarian innovation processes requires important investments in terms of time and resources (as demonstrated by the lengthy selection process, the capacity development support given to innovation teams). They also show that it is essential to adapt methodology and language around innovation to ensure the process is accessible to community members (as in the example of ASECSA’s participatory art and focus on empathy and motivation in the selection process).
However, these approaches also have considerable differences and present specific trade offs and risks. Both CDP and YEU invested a lot upfront in creating a proposal development and selection process which is thorough, robust, and focused on capacity building of community-based organisations and the technical aspects of innovations. But this was also time consuming, and meant narrowing down to a few innovations. ASECSA’s approach was quicker (between 1–2 months compared to 4 months) and placed greater emphasis on motivation, direct community empowerment and collaboration, and practical learning from trial and error. .
As the programme develops we will continue to gather data and evidence on the effectiveness and suitability of different approaches to fostering community-led humanitarian innovation and generating greater social value. Shifting power and decision making closer to communities affected by crises is not a quick and easy process, and there are no easy answers. Across the CLIP partnership, we will continue to ask questions, reflect and share what we’re learning.
