LocationsThe Maldives Accelerator Lab Story
Gadha Hathareh ގަދަ ހަތަރެއް
December 4, 2025
Of Fours - Our Beginning, Our Becoming
Within Maldivian sports culture lies a phrase familiar to any fan: Gadha Hathareh ގަދަ ހަތަރެއް (the great four). In local sports vernacular, it signals the “great ones”- the giants of the sport - those who stand above the rest not just because of skill, but because of heart, courage, and the ability to lift an entire community’s spirit with a single moment of brilliance. For decades, Gadha Hathareh figures have shaped constructive island rivalries, driven national pride, and anchored the country’s identity.
For us, along the winding journey of the in the Maldives Accelerator Lab, Gadha Hathareh came to mean more than a number. It became a compass.
Four years
Four directions of learning - exploration, experimentation, mapping, and reflection
And, perhaps most meaningfully, four Labbers in the Lab’s entire lifespan - each bringing a distinct way of knowing and being.
Fathimath Lahfa (Lalla), Head of Exploration - who reminded us to always ask “what if?”
Hussain Rasheed (Hussain), Head of Experimentation - who turned bold ideas into living prototypes.
Khadeeja Hamid (Khady), the first Head of Solutions Mapping - whose thoughtful footsteps became the terrain that I, Aishath Nayasheen Ahmed (Naya), as the current Head of Solutions Mapping, continued to walk, wade, and swim in. Together we navigated new islands, wetlands, and waters - weaving stories and people, ideas and imagination.
Together, Gadha Hathareh - four minds, four years - defined our story.
That is what Gadha Hathareh means to us: four ways of becoming - to explore, sense, test, and grow.
Reflections from the current Solutions Mapper
My own role is now evolving. As I write this, I am also closing the final action plan of the Maldives Accelerator Lab for 2025 - one more, for the last time. Yet the work, the spirit, the questions we carried - these will continue to flow into the veins of the UNDP Maldives Country Office. Our legacy is not a document; it is a way of seeing.
For over three years, my title has been more than just a job - it has become a story of its own. Where else can one be a Head of Solutions Mapping? It has sparked curiosity, laughter, and connection - often leading to deeper conversations about innovation, experimentation, and imagination. I often say I have a unique job title that perfectly matches the fascinating work I get to do.
As the UNDP Accelerator Lab globally concludes by the end of 2025, our story reaches a moment of transition.
As the last remaining Labber, I write this reflection not alone but with Khady - who has rejoined UNDP Maldives as Programme Specialist for Resilience and Climate Change.
This final reflection brings together the first and the last Heads of Solutions Mapping - to look back, connect the dots, and map what it all meant. Together, we trace the path that our Lab has taken here in the Maldives - across more than 30 islands and 13 atolls.
First, we set out on a journey
Many will remember that evening in March 2021 when we launched the Maldives Accelerator Lab - the quiet excitement, the metaphors flowing as easily as the tides. We introduced the Lab through the image of a Dhoni: a traditional Maldivian boat, easing out from the shoreline, and we spoke of innovation as a journey - uncertain, exhilarating, and full of possibility.
Those early months were filled with curiosity and collaboration of the best kind - demystifying new language, grounding global concepts in local realities, and asking how we might reimagine tourism, resilience, and development through a more experimental lens.
Then, we Listened
- to people, to places, to the rhythm of island life.
Our first blog, Listening to the Present, Exploring the Future, took us across islands as we asked: How do communities imagine their own futures?
We found that innovation was never foreign - it was, and is, deeply local - already alive in everyday practices, in how people adapted to tides, monsoons, and opportunity.
Our first intervention spanned four atolls, documenting the subtle yet powerful ways island communities solve problems together. Those early steps shaped our ethos: innovation begins with listening.
Next came Ha’llu Foshi - our first catalogue of local solutions.
Across ten islands in five atolls, we mapped over forty community-led initiatives tackling challenges from waste to livelihoods to climate adaptation. Each reflected how Maldivians think in systems - connecting land, sea, and community in circular ways.
For us, the Social Innovation Platform - developed by the UNDP Bangkok Regional Hub - became the sandbank that linked our journeys: a distinctly Maldivian space of convergence, a place where ideas gathered, mingled, and took new form. It was here that we learned how to move from isolated pilots to ecosystems of solutions.
From Islands to Cities
Our journey began in the islands, where we learned how communities shape solutions through local knowledge and shared problem-solving. But as population patterns shifted, so did our questions.
With over half of the Maldives’ population now living in urban areas - and global trends showing that 70% of the world will live in cities by 2050 - we needed to understand what development looks like when islands become cities.
This led us to co-create the Liveability Index with the Housing Development Corporation (HDC), not just to measure infrastructure, but to understand how people experience a city - whether they feel safe, connected, and are able to belong.
Through this exploration, we saw how citizens experienced safety, access, and connection - as they transitioned from island homes rooted in community to vertical city living that calls for participatory design and planning.
Our work informed liveability assessments across islands and cities - from Hulhumalé to Fuvahmulah, Addu to Kulhudhuffushi, and Thinadhoo - creating spaces for shared learning among councils, planners, and people who call these places their home.
From Participatory Planning to Participatory Mapping
From participatory planning came participatory mapping - a way for communities to make their knowledge visible. Before the term “collective intelligence” entered our vocabulary, Maafaru’s Women’s Development Committee had already shown us what it meant - local, grounded, and deeply human. Even as we joined the Collective Intelligence for Climate Action learning cohort, we were reminded that the definition was already alive in practice, long before we named it.
Across four atolls, we worked with island councils, women’s groups, and youth to map not just geography, but daily realities: flood zones, waste routes, safe shelters, and community assets.
This local data became vital for disaster preparedness. In Maafaru, for example, women mapped storm surge entry points in residential areas that were not captured in official hazard maps - a dataset that went on to guide the island’s disaster management plans.
Through this work, we saw how collective intelligence emerges not from technology alone, but from the shared knowledge of people who know their islands best.
As members of the Maafaru Women’s Development Committee put it best:
“We learned so many new things about the island - most of us have lived here all our lives, and yet we still do not know everything individually. But as a community, we know everything about the island.” - Aisha & Leela, Maafaru WDC
Where knowledge becomes practice.
From Beach to Farm, we followed how coastal communities transform seaweed into fertilizer - another reminder that collective intelligence in the Maldives is deeply material. Just as our mapping work showed how local knowledge, when made visible, can strengthen planning and preparedness, this journey revealed how ecological knowledge, craft, and experimentation come together to create new forms of livelihood. It was this same interplay of people, place, and practice that led us to look more closely at how innovation unfolds across sectors - informing our explorations in Digital Maldives: Pathways to Development, The State of Digital in the Maldives, and The Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Study. Together, these studies helped us trace how local wisdom is shaping emerging digital behaviours, entrepreneurial pathways, and a creative economy rooted not in abstraction, but in the lived intelligence of communities.
From Best Practices to Next Practices
The lessons we uncovered now feed into what the global Accelerator Lab network calls Next Practices - adaptive approaches that emerge when experimentation meets purpose.
As the global chapter of the UNDP Accelerator Labs comes to a close – six years after its launch - we mark not a conclusion, but a continuation. The extension beyond its initial 3-year lifespan itself stands as proof of the Labs’ success: their ability to spark curiosity, enable experimentation, and inspire new ways of tackling complex development challenges.
In the Maldives, our own four-year journey reflects that same drive to question, to co-create, and to reimagine. It has been a journey of working alongside communities, uncovering insights, and testing ideas that bring people closer to the center of development. As the network evolves from experimentation to integration, we carry its spirit forward - keeping alive the belief that innovation is not a phase but a way of working.
From digital ecosystems to citizen-generated data, from social innovation platforms to community-led resilience, we’ve mapped more than projects - we’ve mapped a mindset.
Unlike conventional development models that position communities as passive beneficiaries, this mindset recognizes people as co-designers and knowledge-holders. It is rooted in the belief that solutions are strongest when they emerge from lived experience, collective intelligence, and the everyday ingenuity already present in communities.
What Lives On
As the global Accelerator Labs chapter comes to an end, our work does not. What began as an experiment is now being woven into UNDP Maldives’ ongoing programmes - from climate resilience to urban and digital governance to youth innovation.
The Lab was never a standalone unit. It was a way of working - one that will live on through every project that puts communities at the centre, every partnership that tests new ideas, and every policymaker who sees experimentation not as a risk, but as a responsibility.
For us, Gadha Hathareh will always stand for the four kinds that shaped our path - and for the many futures still to be mapped, island by island, story by story.
By:
Aishath Nayasheen Ahmed - Head of Solutions Mapping, UNDP Maldives Accelerator Lab
Khadeeja Hamid - Programme Specialist, Resilience and Climate Change, and former Head of Solutions Mapping, UNDP Maldives Accelerator Lab
