Building Capacity and Scale for Emergency Response Initiatives
Why innovation is essential in the humanitarian sector: lessons learned from a UNHCR/UNICEF partnership.
By Amy Lynn Smith, Independent Writer + Strategist
If necessity is the mother of invention, then innovating to address the challenges faced by the humanitarian sector is the ultimate matriarch.
It’s not simply the sense of urgency involved in helping people during emergencies and protracted crises, including refugees and asylum seekers. Innovation is essential to finding effective ways to make the biggest possible impact with limited funds so people’s immediate and longer-term needs are met.
To achieve education for all, for example, particularly in the context of limited humanitarian funding, it’s essential to harness innovation and scale what works. However, there is little evidence currently available on what works — and what doesn’t work — in education innovations, or how to bring what does work to scale. This challenge is felt across the humanitarian sector and beyond.
Not every innovation is a success story, nor have many of them been studied closely enough to deliver rigorous evidence. But educational innovations are springing up everywhere, such as the one that changed the life of Yvette Dusabe, a refugee living in the Kiziba Refugee Camp in Rwanda.
She had a dream she was clutching tightly to her heart. Having completed secondary school, she was determined to go on to university, but as a refugee her opportunities were scarce. She wasn’t eligible for the scholarships available to Rwandan citizens, so she spent seven years waiting and hoping, ever optimistic that somehow, she’d find a way to attend university to pursue a career and a better life.
Finally, Yvette was accepted into the Kepler program in Kiziba, which provides access to online, U.S.-accredited bachelor’s degrees through their partnership with Southern New Hampshire University. Yvette earned her Bachelor of Arts (BA) in August 2019.
The value of this kind of innovation doesn’t only apply to education. What is being achieved through partnerships like that of Kepler and SNHU, and other innovative initiatives like it, provides learnings that can be applied to other humanitarian innovations.
Lesson learned: Research that sits on a shelf won’t further any initiative, let alone an innovation. It’s essential to transform research findings into action.
Yvette provides a powerful example of the positive impact innovative education initiatives, like Kepler, can have on the lives of refugees and other displaced children and youth. Uprooted from their homes — where perhaps they were already in school, working toward a bright future — they deserve the same quality education as any other child or young person. Accessing accredited education is valuable for all young people, to build the skills and self-confidence necessary to thrive, but much more monitoring and evaluation is required to bring ideas like these to scale.
The Humanitarian Education Accelerator (HEA) — a UK Department for International Development (DFID)-funded partnership between the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and UNICEF — was created in 2015 to address this very issue, and provides learnings any humanitarian actor can leverage for their own benefit.
The HEA identifies promising Education in Emergency (EiE) innovations, supporting these innovators by providing initial funding, building their internal monitoring and evaluation capacity, and guiding them on how to effectively and sustainably scale their innovations. The HEA also supports the generation of evidence on humanitarian education through its partnership with an external evaluation firm, American Institutes for Research (AIR).
Since 2016, the HEA has supported five humanitarian education innovations around the world, including Kepler.
“Each of the five innovations has been given different types of support by the program,” explains Charlotte Jenner, HEA Communications Officer at UNHCR. “One part of the support speaks to the need to build evidence in the area of EiE, so individual evaluations have been undertaken on each of the innovations, and the individual evaluations are combined into a meta evaluation.”
The HEA’s unique approach to education innovations is notable in and of itself. But what is the most relevant to every humanitarian initiative — educational or otherwise — is the HEA’s emphasis on helping these programs with the scaling process.
Clara van Praag, former HEA Program Coordinator at UNHCR, emphasizes that the scaling aspect of the HEA is critical to linking research to practical action points, an essential aspect of any humanitarian innovation. Often, a great deal of time is spent on research and evaluations that are reviewed internally, but don’t bring out clear recommendations for other programs. The HEA is using what it learns along the way to take an evidence-based approach to scaling for innovation.
“It’s the key question of transferring research into action within the innovation space,” she says. “That’s of interest to anyone working in innovation, even beyond education, because we need to look at how research and evaluations change the innovation.”
Lesson learned: What might work for one situation might not be the right solution for another. So customized scaling is crucial for any humanitarian endeavor, because no two organizations, challenges, or country situations are alike.
The HEA is designed to generate evidence that can support the design and delivery of high-quality education interventions at scale to children and youth living in humanitarian and crisis settings. To support this endeavor, the HEA has brought on AIR and a scaling mentor, Ian Gray, Director of Consultancy at Gray Dot Catalyst, which specializes in strategy and innovation. Together, AIR, Gray, and the HEA grantees are observing, evaluating, and bringing together learnings on scaling education innovations.
“When it comes to scaling, it begins with recognizing where a team is on the scaling journey, and the teams were all at different stages of development when I came in about six months into the HEA,” Gray explains. “So it was about getting an understanding of where they were in the moment, where they want to be, and where the gaps are along the way.”
The HEA has brought the teams together five times as a cohort so far, with two of those sessions co-facilitated by Gray, to provide insights into theories of scaling and get them to think through what that means for their initiatives. They also explored some of the results of evaluations conducted by AIR, particularly in the final gathering of the cohort.
“It gave us a chance to look at some of the learnings we’d had from evaluations to date and validate those learnings, so the teams could learn from each other,” Gray says. “It was a nice blend of reflecting back to them what the researchers have found but also giving them the tools and approaches to think about how they might make improvements moving forward.”
Lesson learned: Innovators should review their partnerships often, and honestly assess whether the partners they are engaged with offer the greatest ability to scale the innovation. Measuring impact isn’t only about the innovation itself, but also about the success of its partnerships.
Another important aspect of the HEA is strengthening partnerships within the context of innovation. In addition to coming together to learn and share as a cohort, all five HEA grantees were involved in a partnership during the development and/or scaling of their innovation, whether those partners were other humanitarian actors, development actors, the private sector, or government. There’s no question that effective partnerships are an essential element for sustainably scaling humanitarian innovations.
However, the HEA found that understanding how to assess, build, maintain, and review partnerships at different points in the scaling journey is often limited, making these additional steps that should also be factored into planning any humanitarian innovation. Strengthening an understanding of partnership approaches and management, as well as developing process and outcome metrics for partnerships, need to become an area of sharper focus and require increased funding to bring innovations to scale.
Lesson learned: As UNHCR’s Innovation Service has discovered, innovation is actually about people, so the people and organizations working on a project are the natural starting point for scaling any initiative. The guidance of an outside expert is a great benefit, to develop a customized approach that addresses an initiative’s unique challenges and goals.
It’s important to not only bring together the teams working on a project, but also to offer the kind of external mentorship that can provide skill sets that may not already be part of an NGO’s typical structure. Having an outsider guide processes can help build capacity and be conducive to scaling.
In that spirit, Gray also ran workshops for the teams individually. For example, he worked with Libraries Without Borders — which created the Ideas Box, a learning center in a kit that can be set up anywhere in 20 minutes — to help them better define their services, customers, and business models.
“That involved working with our team to identify some business model innovation work,” he says, “and then to do some homework developing three or four business models that had potential.”
One of these was what Gray calls a “shared service model” while another was “selling to governments” — a model with great potential across the humanitarian sector because getting Ministries on board is a valuable potential scaling mechanism for innovations. Together, Gray and Libraries Without Borders talked through the most promising ideas and how to test them, and ultimately honed the shared service offering that was quite similar to what they were already doing to develop and scale it further.
Another example is Can’t Wait to Learn, a War Child Holland project, which provides learning opportunities through curriculum-based educational games on tablets to conflict-affected children worldwide. In their case, Gray hosted quarterly reviews in person or via videoconference, so they could take a step back and look at where they were going strategically, and develop key actions for moving forward.
“They made some significant progress because they were getting advice now and then as they were planning, and there was some accountability to someone outside their organization for staying the course,” Gray says. “It also allowed the director and the leadership to take a participant role while not having to facilitate, so they could have a say on the content as well.”
The workshop for Kepler focused on reviewing and strengthening their collaboration with their key partner, Southern New Hampshire University. For the projects of Caritas Switzerland and World University Services of Canada (WUSC), Gray emphasized an in-depth scaling assessment and scaling goal-setting processes.
“In terms of scaling, those teams really hadn’t codified what their innovation was or what the model was when they had come into the program,” he explains. “It’s impossible to scale something if it’s just inside people’s heads. Now they have specific packages and work streams that codify their model so it’s replicable.”
One important point Gray makes about all of the teams is that when it comes to scaling, it’s not just about the innovation itself, but about the team and the organization. So a lot of the time spent with the teams focused on organizational design, team culture — almost every aspect of what it means to be a business unit or a business.
For many humanitarian organizations, long-term planning, such as creating business models, is a different way of working, given that they’re used to short-term, donor-funded projects to provide emergency services. Thinking through future development goals with an eye toward sustainable scale is a significant shift in mindset, but an important one that not only helps initiatives make a lasting impact but takes into account the inclusion of host communities and governments.
“What you find in scaling is there’s a lot of mentoring that’s actually about how you manage people and processes, and how you build policies and structures,” Gray says. “How do you think about your position within an organization and your business model as you grow? So an awful lot of it is less about the innovation itself and more about the organizational structure, and how you manage a growing team or organization.”
Universal learning: Scaling innovations is complex, and the lack of a linear process, especially in an emergency, means there’s often a “messy middle” that requires adaptability and planning. Building the capacity of teams, partners, key stakeholders, and governments is essential, as is making sure funders understand that financial support must take into account the complex realities of scaling and support the different stages of the scaling process.
Although the journey is unique to each of the teams, the HEA recently posted some central learnings from the HEA’s scaling work to date. Here are some of the takeaways, explained in more detail, which are applicable to scaling any innovation.
According to Gray’s initial scaling framework, created with Dan McClure in 2014, the first stage of scaling is to “scale up,” where complexity is added that’s often overlooked when a new invention is piloted. This stage helps create a sustainable solution, through establishing an identified business model, adding in missing components and features, and connecting with the supply chain and ecosystem in a sustainable way. Next comes “scaling out,” which emphasizes taking complex strategies and issues to make an innovation easier to adopt. The goal is to ensure the solution is easily replicable for new users and across multiple organizations.
This process isn’t linear — which is typically true with most innovations. Gray notes that in the case of the HEA projects, this non-linear approach tends to be driven by funding, context, and scaling design. Because the humanitarian context requires initiatives to be adaptable, the scaling design needs to adapt as well.
Some other key takeaways in the HEA Learning Series piece emphasize the crucial role of governments — particularly Ministries of Education (MoEs), whose sign-off is essential to scaling education innovations, given how highly regulated education is — as well as partnerships with governments, implementers, creators, and funders, which will be critical to the success of the HEA innovations after the initial funding they were provided runs out. A sustainable business model is also a must-have for scaling an innovation.
“What I’ve done with a number of the teams is to look at what the end state of the innovation might be,” Gray explains. “In 15 years, will the government be delivering the solution or will it still be in the hands of NGOs and organizations like UNHCR? Other times, we simply ask, ‘What’s the next stage in the journey?’”
Lesson learned: Measuring and evaluating impact in innovations is essential for pilots to scale up effectively. Not only is a strong evidence base required for sustainability, but it also helps initiatives better understand the essential elements of their innovation, so it’s clear what elements to hold on to when adapting and moving into new contexts — ideally establishing a long-term solution.
Through building monitoring and evaluation capacity, providing mentorship, and conducting rigorous evaluations, the HEA aims to help humanitarian education practitioners adapt and solidify their innovations into sustainable initiatives, yielding positive education outcomes for as many children and youth as possible. All innovations struggle to demonstrate their impact — which requires measurement of learning outcomes beyond access to education, enrollment or attendance — which is why all the strategies employed by the HEA provide valuable lessons across the humanitarian sector. These strategies must be started in the design phase and carried through into the rollout of a long-term initiative.
Although there have been some challenges and not every initiative has worked out quite as the teams had hoped, the HEA team is optimistic about what they’ve learned so far and how it will shape the future of the program. They’re taking advantage of every opportunity to share what they’ve learned — not only through their Learning Series page on Medium but also through academic journals, at conferences, and directly with governments and funders.
“Although we’re so closely connected to education innovation, we believe what we’re learning will yield some really strong recommendations for the innovation community outside of education,” van Praag says. “These recommendations are really cross-cutting and, we hope, helpful to the broader scale of humanitarian aid.”
