Six things we have learned from running a humanitarian accelerator
Some of the world’s most well known companies, including Dropbox and Airbnb, were launched through accelerators — three to six month programmes that provide support services for young businesses (or startups) to make them ‘investment ready’. Traditionally, an accelerator includes mentorship, knowledge sharing on key business skills and strategies, and in some cases seed funding. The idea is that this intensive period of support will ‘accelerate’ the startups to be in a position to attract significant investment in order to continue their growth. Accelerators will generally also try to link startups with investors who can provide the funds (in exchange for equity) for the next stage in the business’s growth.
While the concept is starting to be translated across sectors, accelerators are still a relatively new and unexplored idea in the humanitarian sector. As a result, the Humanitarian Education Accelerator (HEA) has had the opportunity to tread fresh ground in developing its model to support innovations within the humanitarian education space. Where the traditional accelerator focuses on providing a cohort with business acumen and support, as well as linkages to investors, the focus of the HEA has been grounded in building a strong evidence base. This is so that innovative programmes can demonstrate their impact, through rigorous research and improved monitoring and evaluation frameworks. The HEA has also provided mentoring support to assist with the complex process of trying to sustainably scale these innovations.
Throughout the journey of designing and implementing the HEA, we have learned a lot. We have enjoyed the thrill of seeing things work well and have navigated our way through the things that have proved challenging. With each of these experiences, we have had the opportunity to build a collection of learnings. We will be sharing as many of these learnings as possible, through the HEA Learning Series.
To kick us off, here are six things we have learned from running a humanitarian accelerator that we hope will be useful for anyone at the beginning of the process:
- Focus as much energy as possible on assessing the teams that make up the cohort
Similar to traditional accelerators, a significant amount of time and energy should be spent on assessing the teams (and their wider organisations) regarding their suitability to join the cohort. Some specific things to consider are:
- The internal capacities and readiness for scaling of both the implementation team and the wider organisation;
- How far the grantee has already progressed in terms of thinking about and planning for scaling;
- To what extent the grantee has established partnerships with the national government in the country/countries of operation;
- At what stage is the innovation, across key scaling indicators;
- Are the members of the cohort at a similar stage in their innovation journey?
2. Ensure the Accelerator programme is at least three years in length
This provides sufficient time for grantees to make substantial progress in their scaling journeys, and allows for changes of direction and new iterations (or pivots) that are required as innovations start to scale.
3. Set up clear performance metrics of the accelerator at the outset
Clear performance metrics should also incorporate clear milestones that are checked throughout the duration of the programme, through a stage-gated process. The ‘stage-gate’ process means dividing the programme into multiple stages, each of which has clear milestones and performance goals attached to it.
4. Organisational ‘buy in’ and building effective multi-disciplinary teams
Acceleration is a period where the team behind an innovation can grow significantly — from one or two people whom everything is reliant on, into an expanding multi-disciplinary team — as the innovation starts to scale. This poses different questions for established organisations and start-ups. For established organisations it requires ‘buy in’ from the host organisation; an ability to flex organisational processes, hierarchies, rules and policies. For startups that do not have a larger host organisation, guidance is needed on how to build an organisation from the ground up. The task of building organisations and teams, systems and processes etc. should not be underestimated. Providing mentorship that can advise on this journey is critical.
5. Hire a mentor (or several mentors)
Mentors are crucial for providing strategic advice to the accelerator participants at key moments in their journey. There is a need for strategic mentorship from someone who has the view of the whole scale up effort and can support the grantees across multiple disciplines and areas. There may also be the need for mentors or advisors for particular technical areas, where deep specialist domain knowledge is required. When deciding whether to have one or multiple mentors, the main consideration should be the extent to which you wish to gain learnings and insights from across the cohort. If cross-learning is a priority, a single mentor can be a way of facilitating this.
6. Take the time to build trust within the cohort
To foster peer-to-peer learning, which is one of the main reasons for building a cohort, trust needs to be built between the grantees to encourage willingness to share frustrations and failures, as well as successes and best practices. Face-to-face meetings are a critical way of building this trust. Ensuring that you have the budget and time for multiple cohort workshops across the accelerator’s life cycle provides the familiarity and shared areas of interest to build this trust. Trust takes time, and it will take a few workshops before people are willing to share their experiences with other grantees, or in a plenary group. Also, unlike most private sector (or even government) accelerators, the cohort in the HEA is made up of grantees that are often spread out globally with little budget for face-to-face meetings. Therefore, providing the funds, space and support for each grantee to meet face-to-face as a group enables them to make step changes in their scaling journey together.
These six learnings are just a small part of a larger body of evidence that we have been collecting over the lifetime of the HEA programme — around scaling education in emergencies (EiE), managing a humanitarian accelerator, as well as the process of evaluating and capturing the impact of EiE innovations. We look forward to sharing more of this evidence with you in the coming weeks and months. Watch this space!
Blog produced in collaboration with HEA mentor, Ian Gray, of Gray Dot Catalyst.
