The Hidden Entrepreneurs: How Small-Scale Grassroots Innovators are Contributing to Sustainable Development
By: Amory Gonzalez, Kavita Seshan, Pouria Arasti, David Bernstein, and Dinar Ayu Adeline LSE Capstone Project Group
As a group of five Master of Public Administration candidates from LSE, the London School of Economics and Political Science, we are excited and thrilled to have partnered with the UNDP Accelerator Labs. A network of 91 Labs throughout 115 countries that accelerate learning on sustainable development and provide actionable insights to local stakeholders and governments to drive progress towards the Global Goals.
The UNDP Accelerator Labs approached us with a prospective research project to identify policy solutions that promote innovation in developing…
By Gina Lucarelli, Team Leader, UNDP Accelerator Labs
“The acquisition of knowledge always involves the revelation of ignorance — almost is the revelation of ignorance.” - Wendell Berry, writer and Kentucky Farmer quoted in Donella Meadows, Systems Thinking: A Primer
This quote blows my mind. It spoke to me when we were looking back at the build of a global network of 91 social innovation labs inside the United Nations Development Programme. …
Reflections on the UNDP Accelerator Labs Explorers Global Summit 2020
By Benjamin Ong, Head of Exploration, UNDP Accelerator Lab Malaysia
In a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (commonly known as VUCA) world, the three ways of working that have shaped our global lab network — Heads of Solutions Mapping, Exploration, and Experimentation — have proven to be highly valuable but, I have to admit it, they may still be esoteric for many.
For Exploration in particular, the ambiguity of the Head of Exploration’s (a.k.a. Explorer’s) job description provides an opportunity to implement activities in innovative ways (read: shine a light…
Published by: Data Powered Positive Deviance DPPD
The following piece was written by our partners from the Data Powered Positive Deviance DPPD initiative and was published on June 9, 2021.
Written by: Ana M. Grijalva, Head of Exploration, UNDP Accelerator Lab Ecuador, Paulina Jiménez, Head of Solution Mapping, UNDP Accelerator Lab Ecuador with Basma Albanna, Doctoral Researcher, University of Manchester, and Jeremy Boy, Network Data Visualization Engineer, UNDP Accelerator Labs.
No Forest, No Life: The Importance of Deforestation
Deforestation is an alarming problem for the Amazon region. In Ecuador alone, the rainforest recedes by hundreds of hectares every year. This…
By Mirko Ebelshaeuser, Innovation Programme Specialist, UNDP Accelerator Labs. Twitter: @MirkoEb
A little while ago Gina Lucarelli put out there what not many people in the development sector dare to say: the Sustainable Development Goals are off track. While confronting us with a rather grim testimony of recent events — we lost 25 years of development efforts in 25 weeks; and the achievement of the Agenda 2030 needs the combined change in behavior of almost 8 billion people on the planet — there was also a glimmer of hope. The re-emergence of distributed action and collective problem solving seen in…
Published by: Data Powered Positive Deviance DPPD
The following piece was written by our partners from the Data Powered Positive Deviance DPPD initiative and was published on April 12, 2021.
Written by: Hodan Abdullahi, Head of Exploration, UNDP Accelerator Lab Somalia, with Basma Albanna, Doctoral Researcher, University of Manchester,
and Esther Barvels, GIS and Remote Sensing Specialist, GIZ.
In every community, there are individuals or groups with uncommon behaviors who, while having access to similar resources, find better solutions to challenges than their peers. Finding these so-called positive deviants and promoting their solutions is referred to as the Positive Deviance…
By: Allen Anie (Ghana), María Gabriela Ayala (Ecuador), Bisam Gyawali (Nepal), Zainab Kakal (Fiji), Lorena Moscovich (Argentina), Berna Mugema (Uganda), Lillian Njoro (Kenya) with inputs from the entire Experimentation network at UNDP Accelerator Labs.
The UNDP Accelerator Lab Network is growing. 31 new Labs are joining the family and expanding the frontiers of our global network of ecosystems. This means 31 new Heads of Exploration, Experimentation, and Solutions Mapping are joining the pack to help us reimagine development for the 21st century. …
By Anand Upender, Design Lead, and Renae Reints, Researcher, Healthy Internet Project
The UNDP Accelerator Labs is excited to announce its collaboration with the Healthy Internet Project, incubated at TED. This partnership is piloting a bold experiment in crowdsourced moderation of the world wide web. UNDP Accelerator Labs in Argentina, Togo, Kenya, Sudan, Iraq, Morocco, Namibia, and Lebanon are leading the effort to further engage their innovation ecosystem and partners to find and address the false, misleading, or personally harmful content in their region.
The UNDP Accelerator Lab in Argentina, for example, will focus their test of the tool on…
India, Morocco, Cabo Verde, and Timor-Leste
By: Rozita Singh, Head of Solutions Mapping, UNDP India Accelerator Lab, Erika Antoine, and Angelica Gustilo Ong, UNDP Accelerator Lab Global Team
Lockdown Gaming
To reduce the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world has gone into isolation — bringing major changes to our daily lives and a new appetite for digitalization. Mandated lockdowns and social distancing interventions have led us to dramatically increase the number of hours we spend in front of our screens to work and connect to our loved ones.
Deloitte’s 2020 digital media trends survey suggests that since the beginning of the…
By: Angelica Gustilo Ong and Eduardo Gustale, UNDP Accelerator Labs Global Team
With only a decade of action left for the sustainable development agenda, UNDP is looking beyond business as usual, to accelerate learning, to find new mechanisms to learn from the margins, and to look into radically new approaches that fit the complexity of current development challenges.
One of those new approaches is learning from women and men, who have managed to solve problems through ingenuity but with simple, frugal means.
Take Made Kusuma, an environmental health graduate from Bali, who was frustrated by the numerous floods caused by…
UNDP Accelerator Labs
Building the world’s largest learning network around development challenges. 91 Labs in 115 countries. http://acceleratorlabs.undp.org/
