New Group Comes Together to Spur Scaling of Innovation at the UN
A project to cut preventable maternal deaths in Colombia progresses from the pilot stage.
Written by Helen Womack.
In remote regions of Colombia, Parteras (traditional birth attendants) play an important role in the delivery and accompanying of pregnant women. But despite having deep ancestral knowledge and being trusted by the local communities, the Parteras are sometimes stigmatised and cut off from the authorities and modern healthcare.
Our partners at the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), in collaboration with the Colombian government, have created an innovation initiative called Partera Vital that will allow the TBA to register newborns and to reduce preventable maternal deaths by connecting with the registry and statistic system and the health system to deal with possible complications, if they need it.
This is just one example of the innovative ideas UN Global Pulse supports. When we and our partners see projects have potential, we work together to see how they might be scaled up for wider adoption.
But a recent report showed the UN family still faces obstacles on the way to innovation scaling. This is why, together with the UN Innovation Network (UNIN), we have set up a new forum called the UN Group on Scaling Innovations to help spread good ideas and practices.
The report, Scaling the Summit: How the United Nations can expand promising ideas to change the world, is the fruit of a literature review and interviews with experts from inside and outside the UN. It calls for greater collaboration to meet the challenges of scaling. Inspired by its findings, we plan to hold webinars and workshops to boost innovation scaling.
“We welcome all UN colleagues,” said Community Manager Emma Honkala. “It doesn’t matter whether you already have some scaling experience or are just starting out on the journey.” Since its launch in April, the group has attracted 67 members.
Innovation is one of five capabilities highlighted in the Secretary-General’s “Quintet of Change”, a plan to transform the UN for the 21st century. Johanna Jochim, Manager of UNIN, said: “We all know innovation scaling is important. We need to move beyond individual pilots and little experiments towards investment in approaches that don’t just have the potential to scale but that actually do transform the way the UN works.”
Enthusiasm is not enough. We need an honest conversation about challenges and our group can offer a space for this. Obstacles at the UN include bureaucracy, the problem of staff working in silos and an under-developed culture of thinking outside the box.
John Bessant, Emeritus Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Exeter, and one of the authors of the report, knows how hard scaling can be. He sees it both as a long, arduous mountain climb and a “multiplayer game”.
“Innovation is all about uncertainty,” he said. “This is not a short-term afternoon hike, it’s a long-term expedition. But fortunately we do have maps.”
Ways to overcome what he calls “pain points” on the journey include clarifying strategy; developing the team, bearing in mind the original thinkers might not be the ones to complete a project; securing staged and flexible funding; and mentoring.
Professor Bessant believes our new group will help people currently working in parallel to “share and compare notes”.
Looking outside our organization for inspiration, we talked to the developers of Zzapp Malaria, a prize-winning AI tool to beat malaria, which is still a scourge to millions in the global south. Created by Israeli social entrepreneurs, the app uses both satellite and on-the-ground data to map areas of stagnant water, enabling governments to use larvicides against breeding mosquitoes.
“In Israel, Egypt and Greece, malaria is a thing of the past,” said Michael Ben Aharon, VP Partnerships and Growth at Zzapp, which is now working extensively in Africa. “You don’t beat malaria with nets. You beat it with larvicides.”
The Zzapp app went live in 2021 after successful trials in São Tomé and Príncipe and Ghana. Mr. Ben Aharon said his dream was to convince a major malaria-hit country — say Nigeria, Chad, Ghana or Uganda — to commit to eliminating the disease, which would involve national mobilisation. Meanwhile, Zzapp grows gradually and will do joint work later this year with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Djibouti.
For scaling success, Mr. Ben Aharon said it was important to have a stamp of approval from peer reviews, donor financing and a lot of patience. “Scaling can take years,” he said. “You have to keep things in the pipeline because you never know when something will click (with a potential partner or stakeholder).”
UN Global Pulse does not itself scale projects but supports teams to achieve scale. We hold workshops, offering tools, guidance and ways of thinking to enable teams to take their innovations to scale. The UNFPA team behind Partera Vital in Colombia attended one such virtual workshop in March 2023.
“It was very useful,” said project team member Oscar Nieto Méndez. “It helped us to identify gaps in our work.” The team will now think further about what resources and alliances they need to progress to a bigger scale.
The social innovation led by UNFPA to help traditional birth attendants was created in 2020 and first used in Chocó, a predominantly Afro-Colombian region. The tool has been used in two more regions of Colombia, reaching more than 600 practitioners of the ancient birth arts, either Afro-descendant or Indigenous, and both women or men.
In a video, one partera (traditional birth attendant) speaks of her long experience: “I have received many babies and not even one of them has died during the deliveries. I have got them all alive.”
Another says: “There are things that as Parteras we know that doctors do not, and there are things that doctors know that Parteras do not.”
Partera Vital: pionera en articular la sabiduría ancestral con los servicios de salud en Chocó
The tool smooths their contact with hospitals and the authorities but it is not easy in a country recovering from conflict, with remote regions lacking connectivity. In some cases, the traditional birth attendants are illiterate and may be speaking languages other than Spanish.
Partera Vital is well aware of the challenges. It admits it has made mistakes and is constantly experimenting. But though scaling will not happen overnight and growth will be gradual, the team has ambitious plans to expand both geographically and possibly into other areas of sexual and reproductive health.
“In a year, we will see ourselves covering more of Colombia,” said Mr. Nieto Méndez. “Eventually, we aim to reach 50,000 traditional birth attendants across Latin America — in Ecuador, Amazonian Brazil, Venezuela among others.
“The Global Pulse workshop gave us a vision. It’s like when you’re riding a bicycle. You mustn’t look down but keep your head up to see the panorama.”
