Introduction: Innovation as a panacea
"Without innovation, there is no way we can overcome the challenges of our time," declares António Guterres, opening up an innovation tribute video created by the UN Innovation Network. The video follows with various UN Executive Heads talking loosely about what innovation means to them, with brief mentions of tools such as blockchain technology, digital finance, and data.
Innovation, defined broadly, has become a sort of panacea in the global public conscience, a universal remedy for socioeconomic problems. It conjures up ideas of technology, movement, and change, thus making it the antithesis to the cumbersome bureaucracy the United Nations has synonymous with. The UN Innovation Network is clearly trying to transform this reputation by encouraging and supporting innovative activities across various UN bodies. But what does this actually mean? What does innovation actually look like when it's taken out of the conference speeches and placed on the ground?
Innovation at UNFPA: A brief history
In 2014, UNFPA launched an innovation initiative and associated fund in order to promote a “strong culture of experimenting with new ideas, failing, learning lessons, and trying again.” The first phase of the innovation initiative allowed organizations to test out new initiatives without significant proof of concept, with several successes highlighted in the Expanding the Possible report.
The second phase of the innovation initiative began in 2018. The 2018-2021 Strategic Plan states that UNFPA will promote innovation to improve programming by:
(a) Creating innovative solutions with partners to address development bottlenecks
(b) Scaling up innovations that have proven to be successful
(c) Partnering with innovators from the public and private sectors, and
(d) Institutionalizing a culture of innovation in UNFPA
The formative evaluation of the first phase of the innovation initiative recommended a more selective approach for the second phase, suggesting that "the Innovation Fund should focus on impact solutions aimed at solving the core problems UNFPA has decided to innovate for (priority thematic areas)." In direct response to this evaluation, UNFPA Management responded by defining four key thematic areas of interest:
mHealth for adolescents and youth
Innovative financing
Data for development
Last mile SRH commodity accessibility
This new strategy suggests that UNFPA is "moving away from an approach that was solely focused on ideation and piloting to one that also incorporates scaling up successful innovation, whilst maintaining space for new untested ideas." By clearly defining thematic priorities and focussing on successful ideas, phase II of UNFPAs innovation initiative is better positioned to successfully and systematically address specific development bottlenecks.
Innovation in "the field": Bringing a buzzword into practice
Innovation, at its core, means the introduction of something new. For an organization like UNFPA, innovation can signify the introduction of new methods or tools to solve long standing, complex, and dynamic problems, such as maternal mortality, teenage pregnancy, or gender-based violence. Innovative methods can and often do include the introduction of technological tools that were not previously available, but it this isn't a necessity. Sometimes, innovation can simply mean a different way of looking at a problem, recognizing that as contexts shift, so do key drivers of development challenges. Given this definition, it is worth noting that UN country offices and other field based development actors have been innovating for a long time, creating new solutions to nebulous challenges under severely constricted resources, without necessarily calling it innovation.
This summer, one of my key projects is to work under the UNFPA innovation umbrella on a project related to mHealth for adolescents. UNFPA Senegal currently runs a 24/7 phone line (GINDIMA) with pre registered audio for adolescent sexual and reproductive health information. This phone line is heavily used with hundreds of calls a day, indicating a large demand for SRH information among Senegalese youth. I find GINDIMA's popularity nothing short of shocking - can you imagine being a teenager and getting information about contraception or sexuality from a pre registered message? We know how many teens are using the service, but how many are not using it specifically because it isn't particularly user-friendly?
Smartphone use has risen dramatically among Senegalese adults over the past six years - with 13% of adults using a smartphone in 2013 and 34% using a smartphone in 2017 (I could not find statistics beyond 2017, but one can imagine that this number has only continued to rise). Mobile phone use is steady above 80%, and internet usage is at nearly 50%. Reaching youth through mobile technologies is a growing opportunity here in Senegal. By setting mhealth as a thematic priority for the innovation initiative, UNFPA is capitalizing on increased smartphone and internet usage across Africa and creating tools to help country offices reach local youth through mobile technologies. The innovation in this situation takes an existing problem - an overwhelming lack of sexual and reproductive health information among youth - and adds a new solution that takes advantage of a changing local and regional context.
Conclusion: Innovation as a tool
Innovation is a new way of describing an age old phenomena of making things better and adapting to a new context. Encouraging innovation requires specificity - what exactly are we trying to make better and why are new methods the best way of solving it? Innovation without context is at best a meaningless buzzword, lofty and condescending to those who dare to ask for specificity. Innovation, then, is best facilitated when a problem is clearly defined. By working to comprehensively articulate the problem of access to sexual and reproductive health information among adolescents, we will encourage innovative solutions.