Humanitarian Innovation: Untangling the many paths to scale

Abstract

The Global Alliance for Humanitarian Innovation (GAHI) was designed to accelerate transformative improvements for humanitarian action by enabling and creating a shared space for the development, use, and scaling of innovative tools, approaches, partnerships, and processes for the global community to more effectively meet humanitarian needs. The purpose of this report is to provide a framework that enables a more robust and structured discussion of the challenges in scaling humanitarian innovations and to highlight actions needed to better enable scaling. This paper looks at 2 levels: First, at the level of specific innovations, it seeks to provide a common framework for understanding the factors that humanitarian innovators and their partners should consider when choosing a pathway to scale their specific innovations. Second, at the ecosystem level, the paper highlights institutional gaps and barriers to scale across the humanitarian innovation ecosystem