Creating Hope in Conflict: A Humanitarian Grand Challenge, is a partnership of the U.S. Agency for International Development, the U.K. Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands, and Global Affairs Canada, with support from Grand Challenges Canada. The Humanitarian Grand Challenge identifies and scales innovations that apply new insights, technologies, and approaches to improve – and in many cases, save – the lives of the most vulnerable people and the hardest-to-reach in humanitarian crises caused by conflict. As well, the Humanitarian Grand Challenge seeks to create wider systems-level changes within the humanitarian sector.

Understanding that operating and delivering aid in conflict zones is incredibly complex and poses unique challenges, the Humanitarian Grand Challenge team was very intentional and realistic about the support needed by innovators when reaching their goals, and involved more than simply financial support. Additional help has been built into the programme, bringing on the World Food Programme’s Innovation Accelerator and Brink to help deliver a supportive network around its innovators that would harness cooperation, create value and spark new opportunities.

Working with innovators operating in conflict zones raised a whole host of unique challenges, even before the Covid-19 pandemic began and shifted the parameters of the project. By constructing a dynamic and versatile support structure centered around the needs and behaviours of its users we were able to create a positive outcome out of this new and unexpected way of operating.

Creating community in conflict

There are more than 168 million people around the world who live in areas experiencing humanitarian crises. But many of these people can’t benefit from traditional humanitarian aid because they are in places made inaccessible by armed conflict.

The Humanitarian Grand Challenge exists to bring assistance to these people by sourcing, supporting and scaling groundbreaking solutions that can respond to these complex needs and significantly improve (and in many cases, save) the lives of vulnerable people.

Humanitarian Grand Challenge recognised that delivering aid in conflict zones poses a unique and complex set of challenges; and that to help innovators meet those challenges they would need to offer them more than just financial support. To that end they aimed to build a supportive ecosystem around the innovation teams, allowing them to learn from one another, get assistance with specific problems and seek opportunities for collaboration.

To make this happen Humanitarian Grand Challenge brought in Brink alongside the World Food Programme Innovation Accelerator in 2019, to work alongside the very first cohort of Humanitarian Grand Challenge innovators in constructing this collaborative ecosystem.

Testing, innovating and evolving

When working with people who are operating in conflict zones you learn quickly that an ability to adapt is paramount and that flexibility is key. In these kinds of environments the situation can change quickly and dramatically, so the humanitarian responses have to be equally responsive. This meant that any attempt to put restrictions around the innovation teams or to second guess their needs would just harm their ability to do their work.

So we began by listening. We listened to what the teams really needed and built a supportive community that could not only respond to those immediate needs, but was flexible enough to adapt when those needs changed.

From the physical to the virtual

In the very early stages the community was based around physical meetings, specifically Humanitarian Grand Challenge's first Innovation Acceleration Week; bringing innovators from across the globe together to learn from and connect with each other.

Throughout the Innovation Acceleration Week we focused on learning the best ways to create serendipitous connections and discover not just what the innovators needed, but the ways in which they preferred to seek out that support.

One of our biggest takeaways from this initial stage was that we were going to have to meet the needs of a diverse range of people, working across many time zones, with varying degrees of internet connectivity. Our challenge was to create an environment that was dynamic enough to be useful and usable to all of them.

With that in mind, we took the learnings from these initial events and extended them to the virtual world, establishing a series of webinars, virtual Town Halls, networking events and 1-to-1 conversations. Many of these events were recorded, and distributed across the community to allow the entire community to benefit from them.

Making the ‘new normal’ a better normal

When the COVID-19 pandemic began, the innovation teams had to find a whole new way to work, and that meant we did too. Thankfully the ecosystem we had created was adaptive enough that we could move quickly and even turn the situation into a positive.

By creating a robust virtual community we were able to access a wider range of people more easily and spin up coaching sessions and workshops more quickly. It was also simpler to capture events and conversations and share them across the network to create a truly global conversation.

The other thing that the pandemic highlighted was the importance of ensuring that community members don’t feel alone or isolated. We proactively encouraged connections and innovators initiated conversations around subjects like mental health, the pressures of scaling a business when you’ve got a young family, and what it’s like to be a woman in what is still very much a man’s world.

While we recognise that that we’ll never be able to going to be able to put a hard and fast success metric around this kind of support, it’s an undeniable factor in the continuing success of Humanitarian Grand Challenge and and you can see the in some of the testimonials from the innovators themselves.

Building on the success

We are now into our 3rd year of working with Humanitarian Grand Challenge and our methods and our approach are quite different from when we began back in 2019. We see that as a mark of success, because it demonstrates our ability and our willingness to listen, learn, iterate and adapt.

As we move into this next phase we hope to introduce more targeted conversations and collaborations. We want to explore how we can connect those working in the same regions or in the same industries and to find ways to capture and support the opportunities that spark from those conversations. At the same time we also want to begin empowering the innovators to make their own connections so that this incredible network can continue to grow and become even more valuable.

‍