About The Project
The Somalia Response Innovation Lab (SomRIL) is an interagency partnership that seeks to create and apply effective innovation to enhance the impact of humanitarian and development investments and interventions designed to improve the resilience of populations in Somalia. The RIL’s aim is to complement the traditional humanitarian system by adapting interventions and methods of humanitarian operations to more effectively meet the needs of populations affected by the crisis. The RIL seeks to develop, test, and roll out proven concepts that overcome context-specific problems or barriers to aid delivery and community recovery. On the ground amongst humanitarian agencies, innovations will work toward reducing the suffering of those affected by the crisis and help communities to recover faster and build back better. The focus was on a research project focusing on the use of innovation to improve emergency response and resilience programs via a matchmaker program.
The MATCHMAKER is a service designed to pair up demonstrable and identified humanitarian challenges experienced by actors working on humanitarian issues, with successful innovations that already exist. The platform is an independent, impartial service to help the organization find new products, services, and approaches that respond to their humanitarian challenges, and referrals to support implantation.
When no solution can be found through the MATCHMAKER service, or there is significant project support needed for challenges, the SUPPORT AND REFERRAL service will link challenges and people to innovation support (e.g. hubs, funding) that exist in Somalia, the region, and globally.
The Outcomes
MADE conducted a series of Human Centered Design (HCD) Workshops that focused on the core principles of HCD: Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Testing.
This was to help the SomRIL team and the iRise Lad based in Mogadishu build better products and services that complement the traditional humanitarian system by adapting interventions and methods of humanitarian operations to more effectively meet the needs of populations affected by the crisis.
These processes helped them get products and services that solved actual humanitarian crisis needs off the ground in shorter times and at lower costs based on the rapid prototyping and iterations influenced by the HCD process.
