Q&A: How innovation can help end hunger
The COVID-19 crisis makes scaling food security solutions more critical than ever, says Bernhard Kowatsch, head of the World Food Programme Innovation Accelerator.
By Teresa Welsh // 29 May 2020WASHINGTON — If the world is serious about achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, United Nations agencies must consider new ways of working that include innovation and private sector collaboration, according to Bernhard Kowatsch, head of the World Food Programme’s Innovation Accelerator. “We have a tradition of scaling innovations, but the recognition was [that] it’s not as systematic, and we need to do better at systematically identifying those innovations that can have the best impact for the people that we serve,” Kowatsch said of the raison d'être for his organization, which was established in 2015 and operates in Munich, apart from WFP’s Rome headquarters. “What we do is identify, support, and scale innovations that can help us in emergency response to be more effective and to sustainably end hunger.” The Innovation Accelerator accepts applications for its so-called innovation bootcamps on a rolling basis from for-profits, nonprofits, startups, nongovernmental organizations, and WFP staff. The programs typically take place over the course of one week, focusing on human-centered design and lean startup thinking, followed by technology and marketing coaching. Then there is a “pitch night” for participants to practice what they have learned. “It’s really [designed] as a high-intensity training program for a one-week period for innovators so they can make the step change,” Kowatsch said. “Once we’ve seen a team over a one-week period, we usually have a good idea of: ‘Can we help them, should we help them, should we accept them in our spring program?’” Teams then have a chance to be awarded up to $100,000 to pilot and scale their innovation. Kowatsch spoke with Devex from Munich to discuss how his team of 50 has adapted its programs in the era of travel restrictions and social distancing and how the coronavirus has made rapid innovation and scaling more critical than ever. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. How does an innovation model help participants develop solutions to problems they haven't been able to fix? What we’ve seen in our bootcamp process is that it really helps to remove you from your day-to-day hectic activities and take you out of your comfort zone. We bring in our own staff — where people work in startups, with accelerators in developing countries, experts from the private sector, from our field operations. “If we’re talking about topics like ending hunger, our goal has to be positively impacting the lives not only of 100,000 but of a million, 10 million people.” --— Bernhard Kowatsch, head, World Food Programme Innovation Accelerator That can provide critical feedback, which is very relevant to get out of their comfort zone and rethink what were their primary assumptions. They may say, “Well, this is what my innovation, my startup does,” and we can really coach them with experts to take the innovation to the next level. This infusion of high-intensity knowledge but rethinking is what has been a success factor to focus the effort, rather than doing this just one hour for five weeks. How can this innovation model be useful during a global emergency like COVID-19? Typically, we would have provided our spring program up to $100,000 of innovation funding, hands-on support through our venture consultants on the team, and connections to our field offices and private partners. This is typically a three-to-six-month period where we really push innovations and augment their capacities. First, we need to look at what are the most successful, the most likely, the best ideas and themes. And then we try and support those that are the likely best ones. For COVID-19, what we’ve started to address globally with our program is systemically looking to problem areas that are coming from our field operations to look for common challenges that could be addressed by innovation. We are also now looking into ways with our field offices we could replicate this with immediate solution deployment, matching and even compressing this boot camp and spring program further so that it can have more immediate impact. This is where typically, in a standard approach, you would write a proposal, you’d go fundraising, you’d start staffing the team, and then you implement. In our case, what we’re trying to do is start testing immediately, so you’ve built something and learn with whoever’s actually using the solution. Are there any past innovations you’ve supported that could be useful in the current situation? We’ve supported things that now, because of COVID-19, are even more relevant. To give you one example, one innovation that we supported is called “food ATM.” That’s now being tested in Sudan and expanded in South Sudan, and we are testing other innovations called “grain ATM” in India. The food ATM is doing exactly what the name says — it’s like a cash ATM, but it’s an automated miniwarehouse where people can go more freely, so they can keep social distance and they don’t have to queue up for distribution. It’s always the innovation teams that drive this. One of the best examples is actually a blockchain project to use blockchain for wallets for refugees. It was one of WFP’s finance officers who came up with the idea initially. We teamed him up with one of the staff from our accelerator. The first test was in Pakistan with 100 people, then five months later with 10,000 people in Jordan. And then six months later, it already scaled to 100,000 people in the Zaatari and Azraq camps [for refugees in Jordan]. Most recently, they expanded to Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh. How do you identify innovations that have the best opportunity to scale successfully? To a certain extent, everything that we’re doing is actually geared towards finding innovations or startups that can go to scale. There are questions about what can scale. If we’re talking about topics like ending hunger, our goal has to be positively impacting the lives not only of 100,000 but of a million, 10 million people. All the scale-ups that have gone through our program in the last year impacted, in total, 1.4 million people last year. We are hopeful that some of these can actually be replicated in different countries. How do you share those innovations so they can be replicated? We have started activity specifically on sharing knowledge and best practices. We try to do this more broadly. Admittedly, some of these things are still in the early days, but we do share them inside of WFP regularly with our country directors when we have our director meetings. We’re also in touch with other humanitarian orgs and NGOs where we’re trying to get the word out — also, the private sector. What’s different for us than for a lot of private sector innovation teams is [that] our primary goal is to make a policy contribution towards ending hunger and/or for emergency response — which means it is in our core interest to spread the word as wide as we can.
WASHINGTON — If the world is serious about achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, United Nations agencies must consider new ways of working that include innovation and private sector collaboration, according to Bernhard Kowatsch, head of the World Food Programme’s Innovation Accelerator.
“We have a tradition of scaling innovations, but the recognition was [that] it’s not as systematic, and we need to do better at systematically identifying those innovations that can have the best impact for the people that we serve,” Kowatsch said of the raison d'être for his organization, which was established in 2015 and operates in Munich, apart from WFP’s Rome headquarters.
“What we do is identify, support, and scale innovations that can help us in emergency response to be more effective and to sustainably end hunger.”
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Teresa Welsh is a Senior Reporter at Devex. She has reported from more than 10 countries and is currently based in Washington, D.C. Her coverage focuses on Latin America; U.S. foreign assistance policy; fragile states; food systems and nutrition; and refugees and migration. Prior to joining Devex, Teresa worked at McClatchy's Washington Bureau and covered foreign affairs for U.S. News and World Report. She was a reporter in Colombia, where she previously lived teaching English. Teresa earned bachelor of arts degrees in journalism and Latin American studies from the University of Wisconsin.