The speed, dynamics, and complexity of today’s challenges are fundamentally different from previous eras. Consider these looming challenges: the impact of artificial intelligence on employment; the potential for disinformation on social media; the need for policies that keep up with and drive innovation, while protecting human rights. Addressing these requires radically new approaches that match their complexity.
The Accelerator Labs are UNDP’s new way of working in development. Together with our core partners, the State of Qatar and the Federal Republic of Germany, 60 Labs serving 78 countries will work together with national and global partners to find radically new approaches that fit the complexity of current development challenges.
Being part of a globally integrated network, each Lab will draw inspiration from both local solutions and those identified elsewhere within the network. Working in parallel, Labs will benefit from each other in real-time, creating a powerful collective learning effect.
NII 2021 Innovator Mervis Ngosa
The Minister of Techonolgy and Science, Felix Mutati with the awarded innovators from the 2022 NII
Accelerator Labs Zambia Artisanal Small Scale Mining Innovator
Embedded within UNDP office, the Accelerator Labs will provide national partners with a set of new services to explore, test and grow solutions for complex sustainable development problems. Our approaches include:
Sense-making: 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 to accelerate development.
Solutions mapping: In close collaboration with local partners, the Labs will identify grassroots solutions and stretch their potential to accelerate development.
Collective intelligence: The Labs will use collective intelligence to support partners better understand facts and ideas, develop new solutions, promote more inclusive decision making, and provide better oversight of what is done.
Designing and testing: The Labs will simultaneously test approaches to tackle a singular complex development problem. This systematic process will allow learning to happen in weeks or months rather than years.
The success of Labs will be seen in three ways: their influence on nurturing experimentation and accelerating development programming, their impact on government policy, and their ability to inspire spin-off public and private ventures.
UNDP Accelerator Labs: Re-imagining development for the 21st century
The impact of artificial intelligence on unemployment. The potential for disinformation to spread on social media. The need for policies that keep up with and drive innovation, while protecting human rights.
Many of these challenges are growing exponentially. The speed, dynamics and complexity of today’s social, economic and environmental problems are fundamentally different from previous eras in history.
The labs will transform our collective approach by introducing new services, backed by evidence and practice, and by accelerating the testing and dissemination of solutions within and across countries. Sense-making, collective intelligence, solutions mapping and experimentation will be part of the new offer from UNDP to governments.
Together with partners, the Labs will analyze challenges within local contexts to identify connections and patterns in search of new avenues of work to act effectively in addressing wicked development challenges.
Building on local innovators
The Labs will identify grassroots solutions together with local actors and validate their potential to accelerate development. Solutions can come in many different forms, from a farmer discovering a new way to prevent floods to a nonprofit that is especially impactful.
The labs will also harness the potential of real time data and people’s energy to respond to rapidly evolving challenges that impact development.
Building on these locally-sourced solutions, the labs will rapid test and iterate new ideas to learn which ones work, which ones can grow, and which ones don’t, bringing experimentation to the core of our work.
The ability to bridge to scale
The labs will accelerate their learning by operating within a global network where each lab learns from the rest, by exploring multiple solutions in parallel, and by designing experiments that teach us whether solutions can work and grow in weeks or months rather than years.
Accelerator Labs will build on UNDP’s partnerships with governments to scale solutions. Together with partners, they will try to learn what combination of solutions can influence how development is delivered. We’ll also be exploring policy frameworks that are needed to frame the ethics and incentives to drive development acceleration and try to identify portfolios of solutions that could spin off into independent ventures.
Upcoming Initiatives
Discover our the latest initiative, read the eligibility criteria and submit an application
In building her career, Nampaka comes with a wealth of knowledge from Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA). At the IPA, Nampaka progressively served in various positions, which included Policy Associate and Senior Policy Associate and her last role was Policy Manager for Malawi and Zambia. She has experience working in the development sector promoting the use of rigorously-generated evidence with partners, policy driven research, leveraging large administrative data systems to inform decision making processes and developing scaling pathways to move promising interventions from research to scale. Working in the Health, Education and Financial Inclusion sectors in Zambia, Nampaka also has experience in agricultural policy analysis and banking with a specific focus on fund management and marketing. As a successful applicant to the B360 internship at Credit Suisse, Nampaka worked in the Export Finance Department under Corporate and Specialty Lending as a Junior Portfolio Manager.
As Head Experimentation for the Accelerator Lab Zambia, Nampaka works with UNDP and partners in mapping the context and nature of development challenges, with a particular focus on understanding systemic issues beyond traditional silos and classifications and identifying drivers of change, and levers for intervention. She will also collaborate with UNDP stakeholders on the design of experiments across different sectors to validate the hypotheses and test the effectiveness of identified prototypes, including (but not limit to) defining variables, formulating hypotheses, and coordinating experimental protocols. She will support lab partners to develop an emerging pipeline of new initiatives, support other activities related to the design and operation of the Lab. This will contribute towards designing and delivering, engaging and meaningful methods for reflection on learning from experiments.
She holds a Master of Arts Degree in Economics from the University of Zambia (UNZA) and a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Economics with Mathematics and Statistics from UNZA.
Ms. Mwila joined UNDP in 2016 as a Programme Analyst on the Biodiversity Finance Initiative (BIOFIN) focusing on development of the biodiversity financing mechanisms and later moved to the Global Environment Fund (GEF V) funded project that promoted sustainable management of forests and wildlife resources. Her work contributed to policy dialogues and integration of sustainable development goals into National development processes. Prior to joining UNDP, Roselyne worked with Centre for International Forestry Research, World Wide Fund for Nature, Zambian Governance Foundation, Zambia Council for Social Development and Zambia Land Alliance managing different portfolios on environment, social economic and policy issues.
In her role as Head of Exploration for the Accelerator Lab Zambia, she identifies, visualizes, and communicates emerging development trends, data, technologies and issues and systemically maps their impacts on the economy, environment, society, and livelihoods of the poorest. This means identifying new sources of evidence and insights, analyzing and visualizing patterns in unstructured sources of data, presenting new insights in accessible and comprehensive ways to enable sense-making and analysis. Altogether, Roselyne maps and assesses local solutions and defining pathways for their scale up in policies or markets.
Roselyne holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Natural Resources Management from the University of Zambia and a Master of Science degree in Governance and Development from the University of Antwerp in Belgium.
Salome Nakazwe joined the UNDP with over 15 years of work experience in programme management, transformational training and action research. She has worked with development organisations at both local and international levels, focusing on promoting sustainable development from a gender focused and rights-based approach. She joins with the UNDP with vast experience in collaborating with Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), development partners and government. She has held key positions responsible for project design, coordination and providing oversight through monitoring and performance appraisal. Salome is a team-player who brings to UNDP skills associated with building capacities of rural communities to improve their lives in the area of leadership development, gender analysis, human rights, advocacy and livelihoods skills development using transformation learning models. Her role at UNDP as Head Solutions Mapping is based on UNDP building the largest and fastest learning global network of Accelerator Labs. The new offering builds on the latest thinking from the fields of complex science, lead user innovation and collective intelligence to accelerate development impact. In her role, she identifies and trains local volunteers, recruiting Universities and think tanks for sustaining long term community outreach and engagement and identification of lead users, providing training and mentoring. Her role will take her to translation of ethnographic and field research findings into learning and action for the acceleration lab activities. Amongst others, she will also explore, document and increase understanding on emerging methods of tapping into collective intelligence for sustainable development.
Salome has a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Education from the University of Zambia (UNZA) and a Master of Arts Degree in Development Communications from the same university.
Locations
