What does it take to innovate in UNICEF?
Discussion details
What does it take to innovate in UNICEF? A bunch of people with different backgrounds gathered to openly share needs and ideas on how to solve them. UNICEF HQ, in collaboration with ThoughtWorks, hosted a four day workshop to identify and prototype ideas that will improve its efficiency following a process that fosters participation, cross pollination, engagement and creativity.
This edition of the workshop dealt with two important factors of UNICEF emergency response: the early warning early action (EWEA) and the information management for humanitarian performance monitoring (IM4HPM). Around 50 professionals from headquarters, regional and country offices, along with representatives from ECHO, DFID, the American Red Cross and IKEA Foundation, met to think together and share their experiences on how to improve the system. In an open, creative way they talked about hopes, fears, needs, procedures, solutions and impressions with the final goal of defining the tools that would make their work more effective to address children needs over the world.
The group was divided in two tracks to tackle the two projects but they worked together to address the common process of innovation.
Bottom-up approach
I attended the workshop representing ECHO. I participated in the track which dealt with the information management for humanitarian performance monitoring. The goal was to analyse needs and existing solutions in order to develop missing components without reinventing the wheel. Some country offices have started to develop solutions that could be scaled up, but they should be adapted to the different nature of the places where UNICEF works. What are the particularities? What are the needs? What is stopping us to react? Who are the users and what do they think about? These and other questions were discussed passionately by the participants of the workshop.
After discussion, there was time to put ideas together. The group agreed the identification of the needs and the capacities of the system. But that was not enough. We had to prepare a presentation in order to present the problem and solution to the management. I was shocked by the imagination and creativeness of UNICEF staff to prepare in less than an hour a comic way of presenting a complex issue. The management thanked the effort and provided useful feedback to the group.
Innovating is a hard task. Humanitarian organisations are cautions about taking risk; there is much at stake.
However, UNICEF showed me its commitment to keep improving and face the difficulty of changing the way things are done. Or at least to try it.
What’s innovation? Which are the specific challenges of the humanitarian community to innovate? Which are the main obstacles to innovate?
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