Community Crisis Intelligence (CCI) has the potential to make crisis mitigation,  response or recovery more timely, accurate and responsive to local needs. CCI solutions can help centre the voice of communities, making it easier for humanitarian responders to meet their actual needs and optimise scarce resources in a context of ever more frequent and significant crises. 

However, systemic challenges in the humanitarian sector, such as competition between agencies, limited capacity for responsible AI deployment, and the failure of innovations to scale, have seriously limited the adoption of CCI solutions and their potential to impact frontline response.

With support from the UK Humanitarian Innovation Hub, we were briefed to develop a range of ideas that could have a ‘system-wide’ impact on the adoption of CCI solutions. As part of this, we proposed a radical reimagining of how the humanitarian sector innovates and scales innovations. The result was a proposal for a Systems Innovation Accelerator designed to foster collaborative innovation and the creation of shared digital public goods, with in-built scaling mechanisms to promote adoption across the humanitarian sector.

Between September-December 2024, we worked with:

• Data Friendly Space, known for their work developing digital tools and infrastructure for the humanitarian sector
• the Start Network, a network of 134 local, national and international humanitarian non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working across six continents
• Ian Gray, an expert in humanitarian innovation and scaling. 

Together we fleshed out the design and further tested the desirability, feasibility and viability of the Accelerator;  looking to develop a proposal for a ‘proof of concept’ that would enable us to run the first Systems Innovation Accelerator in practice.    

We chose the Philippines as a test bed for this design exercise. As one of the most disaster-prone countries in the world, it consistently ranks among the countries receiving relatively low levels of international humanitarian aid compared to the scale of its disaster-related needs. However, it also has high levels of smartphone and social media usage, making it a fertile ground for new digital CCI innovations. The Start Hub in the Philippines also has a thriving membership of NGOs who have a shared vision of humanitarian systems change and experience of collaborating together. 

As part of the process we developed and tested the following with our partners, as well as a wider range of stakeholders and funders:

• Four different operating models for the Accelerator – each with different emphasis, revenue streams and outputs.
• A comprehensive service blueprint of the chosen model – providing a detailed description of how it would work in practice. 
• The first ‘Discovery’ phase of the Accelerator – to learn if our key assumptions about NGOs’ willingness and ability to find a shared problem to prioritise, innovate collaboratively and commit to adopting shared services would stack up in reality.  
• A sustainability and scaling model – for the Accelerator and the CCI solutions emerging from it.

We have a fully designed and costed Accelerator programme and 19 local, national, and international networks of NGOs in the Philippines signed up to participate in the first ‘proof of concept’. Together, they represent over 1,600 NGOs across the Philippines. 

Following our testing, we have an approach that not only represents a radical departure from the usual humanitarian innovation model but also one that we are confident can work. 

Co-developing a shared solution for better crisis response

This first Accelerator would focus on tackling a persistent problem for humanitarian organisations: the lack of easily available, high-quality data on community characteristics and needs before and during a crisis.   

Each of the participating organisations has selected this problem as the most important issue they want to develop a shared CCI solution to address. They have also made an advanced market commitment to adopting the solution – if it meets an agreed set of design criteria. These criteria were developed together with the NGOs as part of testing carried out during this process. 

The Philippines Systems Innovation Accelerator aims to achieve the following: 

• More effective, targeted and coordinated crisis response – through a CCI solution that enables standardised, shared, high-quality data collection and management across multiple NGOs dealing with typhoons, flooding, earthquakes and conflict. 
• Increased confidence and capacity – among NGOs to responsibly deploy AI and utilise CCI together. 
• Community trust and engagement in the final CCI solution – ensuring that is designed with their input, and robust privacy and security management. 
• A locally-owned and sustainable digital public good – a CCI solution with the potential to scale to other crisis contexts through innovative financing and Start Hub network relationships.
• A novel systemic, collaborative approach to innovation – that can be replicated globally through the network of Start Hubs.

The System Innovation Accelerator (SIA) would represent a paradigm shift for the humanitarian sector for five key reasons:

We are now looking for founding partners to help fund the proof of concept for the Systems Innovation Accelerator in the Philippines, and are having conversations with a range of funders, donors and corporate sponsors about how they might support it. If you are interested in how your organisation might be part of changing how the humanitarian system innovates, please get in touch with us.

If you think the model could have application in your sector or business and would like to explore potential collaboration opportunities, please let us know.