Take off your hat, chat freely and scale up UN innovation
The new UN Scaling Group, managed by UN Global Pulse within the United Nations Innovation Network (UNIN), allows innovators to exchange experiences and ideas to scale up promising projects for maximum benefit, while also transforming attitudes and practices within the United Nations.
By Kitty McKinsey
How does a remote hospital keep babies alive on oxygen in a country with no consistent electricity supply? How do you help refugees buy food they might prefer to standard aid rations?
The United Nations is full of creative people producing innovative solutions to such issues, but often the challenge is how to effectively scale up promising innovations, to apply them widely for maximum benefit.
“We saw there is a lot of innovation, but that many people still struggle with scaling,” says Emma Honkala, Community Manager of the UN Scaling Group within the United Nations Innovation Network (UNIN).
“We want innovative approaches to have impact on the ground — to improve the lives of the people we serve — and contribute to UN transformation,” adds Honkala, who is also a Programme Analyst at Global Pulse, the UN Secretary-General’s innovation lab, a worldwide network to advance responsible innovation and help transform the United Nations.
The Scaling Group was launched within UNIN in April 2023 to help spread good ideas and practices, connect innovators working on similar projects and offer a “safe space” for colleagues to share challenges and get fresh viewpoints. It was sparked by recommendations in a Global Pulse report that looked at challenges to scaling innovation within the UN.
To date, the community has attracted more than 300 members from 46 UN entities in 73 countries, as well as representatives of the private sector, government, academia, and international organizations who can bring new knowledge and expertise to the UN.
This is done through webinars and workshops, less formal “coffee chats,” as well as one-to-one contacts. Global Pulse also produced a Scaling Primer to guide UN entities, and plans a podcast for 2024. The group is open to innovators from within the UN and beyond.
Anssi Anonen, Technical Officer on Partnerships and Health Innovation at WHO Somalia, says the Scaling Community offers a place to “drop your organizational hat” and discuss the common challenges of scaling innovations. He appreciates that the Scaling Community “helps bring together isolated good examples and create a body of learning.”
The World Food Programme (WFP) is a leader in innovation and scaling, having set up its own innovation accelerator in 2015. Even so, Aina Pascual, Innovation Community Manager at the WFP Innovation Accelerator, says she and WFP colleagues benefit from being part of UNIN and the Scaling Community.
“The power of this community is amazing because you get linked to people who are doing work similar to yours, but they do it differently. It’s so good to compare perspectives and different ways of working.
“If you get stuck,” she adds, “in a moment you can consult and there are lots of people who are willing to share lessons learned — what worked and what didn’t work. This community of practice is a very good resource.”
The Scaling Community is a good place for participants to share experiences about pilots or projects they scaled, what worked and what didn’t, says Honkala: “it’s very helpful for members to talk about what they learned.”
WHO, for example, only considers scaling innovations that have been assessed by technical experts based on solid evidence and have already been shown to have real impact.
“This could mean an innovation that now reaches 400,000 people and we look at how to support the public sector to jointly scale it to help one million people,” says Anonen. “Or it could be a solution that has proven impactful in one country and WHO is supporting transferring it to another country.”
That’s what the health body did at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic when hospitals in Somalia needed oxygen concentrators to supply medical oxygen to save lives, but had no dependable electricity supply.
“Solar-powered oxygen concentrators were already being used in Uganda in remote primary healthcare facilities to treat not only COVID-19 patients but also small children with pneumonia and other respiratory diseases,” Anonen recalls.
Acting on a request from Somalia’s Federal Ministry of Health, WHO sourced a number of solutions for delivering oxygen in such challenging circumstances, including the Uganda project. WHO then supported the Ministry to select the most appropriate solutions for the Somali context.
In an August 2023 report, WHO report identified four key steps to successfully scaling the medical oxygen project in Somalia: Understanding the context and assessing needs, developing an innovative strategy based on solid data, working with partners to scale up innovation, and finally assessing impact.
Integral to any innovation cycle is occasional failure and much starting over, but “failure” is a term that sets off alarm bells in some quarters. However, innovators point out that experiments that were once controversial now are standard practice. Like cash transfers, preferred by donors, UN entities and beneficiaries. Smart cards, mobile money and even cash in envelopes give refugees and others in need the freedom to buy their essentials in markets and stores.
Like Honkala, Anonen feels that “if you truly want to do things differently, you can’t talk about innovation as a beautiful buzzword and only talk about the successes. You also need to be able to share failures and what you learned in the scaling process to refine how we can effectively leverage and scale innovations for accelerated impact.”
The Scaling Community’s increased emphasis on monitoring, evaluation and learning has paid unexpected dividends, proving you don’t have to be working directly on innovation to benefit from participating in the Scaling Community.
An Evaluation Manager at the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Nicole Henze joined a Scaling Community webinar led by Honkala on using M&E to guide scaling decisions. It looked at what evidence of success is needed to support scaling a project and what evidence of impact justifies investing further.
Not an innovation or scaling specialist, Henze participated because her job is to evaluate whether the UN’s collective response to humanitarian crises adds up to more than the sum of all agencies’ responses. She’s now managing this process for Northern Ethiopia and Afghanistan.
Henze was impressed by the webinar’s “practical, useful, applicable” approach. “I thought it was amazing,” she says. “I learned a lot. Many things prepared for innovation and scaling innovation are very useful for other sectors as well. I can see their application in evaluating regular humanitarian work.”
Another focus for UN innovators is transforming the way the UN bureaucracy itself works by, for example, streamlining internal business practices. Some UN employees may be cautious about transformative innovation, but Anonen sees signs of hope.
“You need to learn how to read the signals,” he says. “If you are getting resistance, it might be a good sign. It might be proof that you are changing the status quo of how we work at the UN.”
