For UNHCR’s Innovation Service, our priorities are always to the field. Today, we are providing operational support to challenges within emergencies, education, data, and energy. We’re catalyzing the innovation environment within UNHCR, and connecting people, initiatives, and programs both within the organization and outside of it. We are nurturing and learning from innovations emerging from affected communities. The next step is to anticipate the needs of the future – we must be proactive instead of reactive as an organization.

Launched in June 2016, UNHCR’s Innovation Fund is an experimental resource that field operations could use to prototype or scale up good practices and test out creative ideas. The architecture of the Innovation Fund was designed to build capacity and invest in people across the organization who otherwise would not receive financial support. The Innovation Fund ended up allocating USD 1.2 million to applicants across twenty-eight countries during 2016. These were some of the lessons learned along the way.

UNHCR’s Connectivity for Refugees program addresses three key challenges: making connectivity available, affordable, and usable. In so doing, it is figuring out ways to bring the digital revolution to displaced people, and to the humanitarians serving them. Simply, we can’t undo the Internet and humanitarian sector will have to embrace technological advances. The challenge for UNHCR will be to lead in this, not be dragged by it.

At the end of 2015, UNHCR was concerned that the “size, speed, and characteristics of the movements” of refugees, particularly approaching winter, may result in adverse consequences for refugees attempting to reach Europe from Turkey. In response to these challenges, a small interdisciplinary team, comprised of five people, was requested to form UNHCR’s first Winter Cell. The Winter Cell evolved into UNHCR’s Intelligence and Analysis Unit and focused on facilitating proactive decision making, rather than reactive. Although short-lived, it was a successful effort to steer UNHCR towards a more data-driven organization, where the collection, analysis, and application of data was used strategically within an emergency.

UNHCR’s Innovation Fellows play a leading role in creating the organizational change that will allow UNHCR to adapt with it. We believe that if you want to innovate, you need to focus on the people and that’s the very basis of the Fellowship. But how do we go beyond the Innovation Fellows and create a change in mindset across the entire organization?

Often in the humanitarian sector, we treat the symptom instead of the root cause of the problem. This was a lesson learned early by Rumbidzai Mapolisa, an Innovation Fellow based in Harare, Zimbabwe. Following her journey as an Innovation Fellow, Mapolisa and other UNHCR Zimbabwe staff catalyzed a transformation of how the country operation operates. Through strategically bringing the innovation process into their programming cycle, they are not only mainstreaming refugee-led innovation but are creating mindset shift in how traditional humanitarian aid is viewed.

Refugees and migrants, speaking a range of languages, needed critical information. They actively sought updates and advice, but often found a range of often misleading rumors on social media. When new waves of refugees and migrants were arriving quickly, UNHCR field staff often ended up answering the same questions over and over again. UNHCR needed a wider range of tools to increase two-way communication with refugees. It needed a way to overcome the site’s poor Internet connectivity, deliver helpful information in a targeted way, and capture user feedback—for a rapidly moving population and then later for a static one.