Recognizing Local Solutions as World-Changing Wins
UNHCR’s NGO Innovation Award honors initiatives of all sizes — and reflects the continual experimentation required to innovate.
By Amy Lynn Smith — Writer + Strategist
When people think about innovation, they often believe it has to be a massive shift — and undertaking — in the way people and organizations work. But something the UN Refugee Agency’s (UNHCR’s) Innovation Service repeats almost like a mantra is that innovation doesn’t always have to be groundbreaking. It simply has to bring value through a novel way of approaching the way people work and think and, in the case of UNHCR, how they collaborate with and assist refugees and other people of concern.
That’s not only a principle of the Innovation Service. It’s also part of the mindset behind UNHCR’s NGO Innovation Award, a collaboration between the Innovation Service and the Partnership and Coordination Service (PCS), which is part of the Division of External Relations. PCS promotes the development of better refugee protection and solutions. Launched in 2018, the Award was initially designed to recognize UNHCR’s non-governmental organization (NGO) partners that are finding new solutions to the challenges they face. Over the years the team has shifted focus from NGOs to refugee-led, community-based (non-governmental) organizations. Community-based organizations are entities run by members of the local community, providing various types of local services and support.
“People often think innovation has to be a high-tech solution, something absolutely disruptive and unprecedented, ” says Giulia Balestra, Associate Innovation Officer. “But it’s very often those local and context-specific innovative approaches that make a clear difference with communities.”
Rujia Yang, an Innovation Fellow in the 2018 cohort, originally suggested the Award. Just as Balestra mentioned, innovation doesn’t always have to be entirely new. In fact, Yang’s idea came from an existing platform called the UNHCR Annual Consultations with NGOs, a yearly gathering of UNHCR and NGO partners.
“We had this high-profile event and I realized we could build a segment of innovation attached to it that gives both innovation and the Award winners more visibility,” she says.
Yang has held various positions at UNHCR but brings a creative eye to each one. Now an Executive Assistant in the Regional Bureau for Southern Africa, she says when the Award was launched, Deputy High Commissioner Kelly T. Clements had a succinct message for those gathered at the ceremony.
“She said essentially, the question of ‘why innovation?’ is simply because we can do it better,” Yang recalls. “I think that’s a very powerful sentence because we want to bring a better life to refugees. And we just have to keep thinking of new ways to try.”
Incorporating fresh thinking into every endeavor
With guidance from the Innovation Service, innovation processes led by Yang helped get the Award project off the ground, says Hans Park, Strategic Design and Research Manager at the Innovation Service.
“It really comes down to a mindset around the work,” he says. “Are you willing to pivot when you need to? Are you willing to stop? Are you willing to try a different path? Are you willing to meet and collaborate on these kinds of decision points? It’s been really nice to see people lean toward these things as part of this.”
Yang emphasizes the importance of teamwork in both getting the Award launched and in looking for new approaches to the program in the following two years. As she puts it, being an Innovation Fellow is not a one-year effort but instead more like a membership for life, so the processes and mindsets learned during the program become second nature.
“Innovation is a journey that requires a lot of drive,” she says. “Organizing anything takes a great deal of work, and at times it can be frustrating, but I learned that although it was not always easy — you don’t just dream of something and there it is — we were able to realize it. Just like the Award applicants, whose efforts I see and am always impressed and inspired by.”
To kick off the Award, the team assembled an international jury that included members from UNHCR, people of concern, NGO partners, and the private sector. The submissions were judged and the winners were chosen by the jury from the headquarters level. But like everything else, that has evolved since the first year, in part because the team felt there might be a better approach, Park says.
Reimagining the Award every year
Although the Innovation Service and Partnership and Coordination Service continue to play a role in collaborating on the Award (watch for an upcoming story on the partnership), the team has taken a different approach each year — true to the spirit of innovation. According to Yang, part of the strategic thinking behind this is making sure the Award remains a long-term endeavor, and doesn’t go by the wayside as UNHCR colleagues move from one assignment to the next, as she has.
In 2018, the Award focused on local organizations that took a people-centered approach to finding new solutions. At the time, the Innovation Service considered the Award itself something of an experiment, to see if it was possible to drive down the concept of innovation from headquarters to the local level. Again, the central idea remained on narrowing the focus to local improvements that can make a big difference to an individual NGO.
For 2019, the emphasis was on inclusion, a priority for UNHCR, as well as connectivity and innovative partnerships. And in 2020, the Award was dedicated to refugee-led organizations, particularly those that had developed creative solutions to COVID-19 from the local, regional, and global level. In 2020, there was a conscious effort to shift away from a headquarters-led effort toward greater involvement by UNHCR’s seven Regional Bureaus.
“They are doing the hard work of identifying potential winners, making the selection, helping with all the administrative work that comes with providing a payment, which seems to have been the biggest hurdle in 2020,” Balestra says. “And it may also be one of the areas in which we’ve learned the most.”
Like any ongoing effort to continually iterate new ideas, each year of the Award has been a learning opportunity for all involved — often requiring the development of new approaches to the way they work.
“I often think about what we’ve learned from any initiative, and one of the lessons from this so far has been discovering how our colleagues as a team understand innovation, how they define it, and how they work on it,” Park says. “Then that was expanded to our partners who received the Award: How do they innovate and act on that?”
There’s always more to learn, as both the UNHCR teams and the Award winners themselves have proven through their success with building new approaches to getting the job done. But what the entire endeavor continues reinforcing is a hugely valuable lesson: No matter the scale, innovation can change worlds.
