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Sifelani Tsiko Agric, Environment & Innovations Editor
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has launched it’s first ever Accelerator Lab for Zimbabwe to help transform the country’s development approaches in a fast changing global environment.
Accelerator Labs represent UNDP’s new way of thinking and strategy calls for bolder innovation to spur development.
“The speed, dynamics and complexity of today’s challenges are fundamentally different from previous eras in history,” UNDP Zimbabwe office said.
“The aim of launching the lab in Zimbabwe is to tackle frontier challenges in development that the world is facing the 21st century such as climate change, migration, artificial intelligence and the informal economy.”
The new Zimbabwe Lab will be part of 60 labs worldwide that seek to accelerate progress towards 21st century “frontier challenges”.
The Lab forms a learning network of Accelerator Labs across the world where offices can learn rapidly from each other on what works and what doesn’t.
One major aim is to ensure that actors in various countries benefit from each other’s learning in real-time, creating a powerful collective learning effect.
“The Accelerator Lab is embedded within UNDP Zimbabwe’s operations, and will bring in new expertise in exploration, solutions-mapping and experimentation to UNDP’s front-line work,” UNDP Zimbabwe said.
“At UNDP, we are disrupting the way we think, invest, deliver and manage to perform faster, better and at scale.”
The labs in 78 countries are supported by an initial US$75 million drawn from UNDP core resources as well as financing from Germany, Qatar, and Italy.
Part of the focus is to bring out grassroots innovation and ideas in various communities where people living close to the problem have critical knowledge that they can share with others worldwide.
This grew out of concern that current approaches are not making enough progress against 21st century frontier development challenges.
The labs intend to bring out changes in how programmes apply innovation approaches in their work, and shift mindsets on how development is done.
“The UNDP Zimbabwe Accelerator Lab will be part of a platform that connects the Lab network to the large ecosystem of partners and external expertise that have signed up to collaborate with UNDP and support this new approach on the ground.
“Together with these partners, the Labs will analyse, in almost real time, the local context challenges to identify connections and patterns to anticipate new avenues of work and act effectively tackle complex sustainable development problems,” the UNDP Zimbabwe office said.
Experts say traditional approaches to development are struggling to keep up with today’s social and environmental challenges therefore.
They believe that the new Labs will try to address how better nations can tackle complex and fast-moving “frontier challenges,” how they can find the most relevant solutions that work locally and they can learn more quickly about what works and what doesn’t.
“The Accelerator Labs should inspire us to do things differently,” said UNDP Zimbabwe Resident Representative Georges van Montfort.
“We expect new ideas to come out of this, putting us in the next frontier.”
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