There are several arguments made against locally-led innovations^⁠1 in the humanitarian sector – or any other community programme invested in by (mostly) western Governments and donors.^⁠2 Certainly this logic holds true in my experience working with communities in both the UK and globally.

Over two articles I explore four of the most pernicious reasons given for not investing in untried and untested ideas that – worse! – are developed by the communities that actually experience and live with the challenge the donor wants to address. I then suggest some ways we might usefully overcome these arguments.

Why should we invest if you can’t define the outcomes in advance?

In the uncertain and ambiguous world of community innovation some donors are nervous about their investments. We know that outcomes are an emergent property of a complex system and therefore can’t be defined and specified in advance of the interventions the donors are procuring. Who wants to try and make an investment case without a clear idea as to what the investment will actually achieve? 

But we all play the game. We leverage the tools of the trade to bring certainty to our proposal for funding and the actual delivery. We define outcomes anyway and show how they will be delivered through detailed theories of change and logic models, we use monitoring frameworks and capture data about the work, report on KPIs, complete risk registers, ensure our policies and SOPs are up to date, and so on.  Tools that are all underpinned by the logic of linear causality and therefore predictability [Which is in itself a strange in a sector predicated on responding in unpredictable circumstances.] . Our tools mean we can promise, deliver and provide evidence of achieving the outcomes donors want to see. Even if we know that it is a fool’s errand to promise such certainty in an uncertain world. The work proceeds in two realities, the one the community experience and the one we report to donors. 

Why should we invest in ideas that are unlikely to be that innovative if left to communities to design?

I recently spent some time in a community in northern Guatemala, close to the Mexican border. These are remote and poorly served communities, by necessity self-sufficient, yet facing some dramatic impacts of climate change. Flooding and droughts are intensifying, the types of plants that can be grown are slowly changing, and there is an increase in predators such as snakes and alligators. Here the community have identified, designed and implemented several innovations that support them to adapt to these changes including a fish farm, water treatment, and removing an invasive species and using it for animal feed. It’s easy to think these aren’t very innovative – we’ve seen these interventions, and others like them, in different places over the years. 

I wrestled with the same analysis myself – until I visited the community and saw the way they had designed and implemented their flooding early warning system. Community members live with the reality of flooding every day, week, month of their lives. They understand what is more likely to work and, more importantly, what won’t. They mapped the risks, when the floods are most likely occur, and the impact of rising waters, before developing a range of ideas. 

Traditionally, a solution would have been developed by the donor through ‘decide and deliver^⁠’ programming, usually controlled and coordinated through Western-based INGOs and done to the community. But this would result in a solution free of the context within which the problem manifests. Instead, the community developed a low tech monitoring device that they could maintain without specialist knowledge or hard-to-get parts, and which included innovative infographics on the side of each house in the flood-risk area, illustrating the priority needs³ of the family in that home. Evacuations, when needed, were done sequentially on the basis of these needs; everyone knew the plan and how to enact it when the alarm sounded. 

Why should we invest in ideas that are unlikely to provide value for money?

All too often we see donors, investors and governments favour projects that tend towards standardisation in order to demonstrate value for their money. If the solution for the flood warning system in northern Guatemala is so bespoke to the local context, we are unlikely to be able to scale it by deploying it in other communities across the world. Whereas if the donor invested in a generic, standardised solution it could achieve economies of scale. Scaleability is one reason why donors so often focus on a tech solution to a problem. The more times the solution is deployed the lower the economic cost of its design and delivery. This approach is great should the solution survive contact with reality. 

Ironically, the hidden costs of failing to account for local context will often result in a more expensive solution. The moment kit can’t be repaired by the community, or no work has been put into ‘what happens after the alarm sounds’… these costs can be conveniently written off as a failure of adoption: ‘it’s not our fault if they haven’t learned how to do minor repairs’. I saw the same in South Sudan where fresh-water wells were no longer used because they had been installed by INGOs whose technical teams had left without teaching the community members how to maintain them. 

In my experience it is also rare that working with a community doesn’t result in a more straightforward and lower cost solution. It’s as though, as experts, we feel the need to prove our expertise through the cleverness and intricacies of our designed intervention and are in some way offended when a low tech solution works. Where is our value then? 

There are also many intangible benefits of communities leading and owning this work, from closer cooperation, a sense of agency, pride, renewed hope for a viable future for their children and their children’s children, ambition for more change, new ideas to explore and pursue. Yet these intangible benefits aren’t quantifiable in advance and rarely factored into any economic cost-benefit analysis. 

So far I’ve looked at three challenges that are focused on innovation as both an approach and the products of that approach. In my next article I will look at what is perhaps the biggest argument to overcome, one of structure and incentives, before suggesting some options for doing things differently.

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¹ https://startnetwork.org/what-we-do/past-programmes/community-led-innovation

² By donor I include all those sources of funds in the public, charity and NGO space: investors, governments, philanthropists, private donors, etc.

³ Such as: infirm/elderly person; someone with mobility challenges, a family with a baby or young child, requirement for specific medications, etc