Call for Innovations: Inclusive Response during Emergencies in India

Deadline: 30-Jun-22

The India Humanitarian Hub Innovation Initiative invites applications from organisations that are creatively working to make disaster response more inclusive.

The aim of the initiative is to use local innovations and knowledge to drive humanitarian sector in India to a new level. Under the current call, they are seeking to support innovations that address the gaps in fostering an inclusive response.

Why are they doing this?

The climate crisis is a current reality and not just a fearful future. It has resulted in disasters becoming more frequent in occurrence, intensive in nature, and increasingly unpredictable. While large scale disasters might get some attention, unexpected, rapid-onset, and small to mid-scale disasters are largely invisible and hence underserved. Immediate response, which is assistance starting within days and extending to about 6 weeks, in such disasters require urgent attention.
Access and availability of safe evacuation, shelters, water, sanitation, hygiene, and health services are some of the immediate concerns for disaster hit communities. Populations that are at the intersections of discrimination due to gender, caste, occupation, sexual orientation, age, physical and mental ability need specific attention. These unmet needs present an opportunity to centre their experiences for developing innovative local solutions for ensuring inclusive and dignified response.

What do you mean by innovation?

Innovation is about more than new technology. While technology often drives innovation, they believe that innovation is a process of defining problems, adapting, and developing new context-based solutions, and taking them to scale. Good innovation has clear problem definition at its heart and requires them to reassess their basic assumptions, and commit to collaboration, learning and the generation of evidence. Innovative ideas come in all shapes and sizes, but they are primarily focused on the development of new products, services, and processes with the potential to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of disaster prevention, preparedness, and response.
They also lay strong emphasis on the involvement of the at risk population in the design, development and delivery stages, thus catering to a more informed and inclusive decision making.

What they are offering?

4 – 6 teams will be provided a maximum of GBP 15,000 each as financial award.
Mentoring and hands-on support as per need.
Opportunity to network with stakeholders including non-profits, researchers, media, private and government agencies.
Visibility on various platforms to attract attention and future mileage.

Who they are Looking For?

Teams who continuously question how to centre inclusion when responding in environments of scarce resources and acute needs.
Ideally a multi-disciplinary consortium of people or organisations having complementary skillsets – entrepreneurial spirit, robustness in research and community-first approach. (Wherever needed, they will help bring in the missing skillsets from the networks of the India Humanitarian Hub)
Diversity in teams. They encourage composition of team members from marginalised castes (SC/ST/OBC), genders, sexuality, religions, and abilities.
They also strongly encourage partnering with grassroots innovators.
Ideas that have been formulated and tested on the ground. It is alright if these ideas haven’t been very successful so far! they value the drive and intent to make progress, despite hiccups.
Clearly defined social impact and sustainability of the solutions.

Criteria

A diverse team (with focus on collaboration between organizations and/or individuals)
A clear understanding of the problem that the innovation tries to address (who is affected and how – the ideas can be for highly localized contexts as well)
Coherently defined innovation (how does it address the identified problem especially from a lens of inclusion) and its potential application in disaster or climate emergencies
Demonstration of thinking around sustainability and scalability of the innovation

For more information, visit https://www.seedsindia.org/call4innovations/