Deadline: 30-Jun-23

The Refugee-led Innovation Fund is currently open to applications from refugee-led organizations in all countries.

Vision and objective

• The Refugee-led Innovation Fund champions the creativity of all displaced and stateless people. It aims to reshape their participation in the delivery of humanitarian work by ensuring they take centre stage in the decisions affecting their lives, leading the identification of needs and the design of innovative solutions.
• The Fund provides holistic support – combining financial resources, mentoring, and other expertise – directly to refugee-led organizations, to enable them to design and deliver new interventions that have a lasting positive impact on their communities.

About the Fund

• Organizations led by displaced and stateless people make remarkable contributions to their communities but face considerable challenges accessing direct and flexible funding. Too often, they are excluded from existing networks of entrepreneurs and innovators, resulting in poor access to knowledge, information, and resources that could help them amplify their impact.
• The Refugee-led Innovation Fund proposes a fundamental shift in programme architecture. It takes a grassroot approach whereby people who have experienced forced displacement are directly provided with meaningful financial resources and support to implement innovative approaches.

What the Fund offers

• Selected organisations can expect the following support:
  • Financial support: Organizations can apply for up to 45,000 USD in funding to test and implement ideas with strong community-approaches that generate value for community members, not specifically linked to any thematic area or technology.
  • Programme and project management support: Grantees will receive assistance from UNHCR and experts to help build their capacity to design and implement programmes effectively.
  • Technical support, expertise, and coaching: Needs-based specialist advice will be offered, on topics ranging from technology to legal support and innovation methodologies.
  • Peer-to-peer networking: Supported organizations will be encouraged to engage with each other, share experiences, learn from each other, and explore partnerships.
  • Other support based on project needs: This could include organizational support, help with project sustainability and scale, training on specific topics, business model advice, and media and communications support.

Approaches

• To achieve its objectives, the Fund has adopted the following approach:
  • Support forcibly displaced people to identify challenges and opportunities, and develop solutions that can have lasting impact within their communities.
  • Provide a holistic support mechanism tailored to their requests, including financial support, mentorship and technical expertise across the innovation lifecycle.
  • Connect disjointed, localized innovation by facilitating peer support, learning and sharing
  • Build evidence that proves the power of initiatives developed by forcibly displaced people, and use this to overcome barriers that prevent them from accessing resources.

Eligibility Criteria

• The Fund supports innovation by all organizations led by people with lived experience of forced displacement, including refugees, asylum-seekers, the internally displaced, returnees, and stateless people.
• Applicants are asked to apply as a team, usually as part of an existing organization. The Fund accepts applications from both registered and unregistered organizations. Additional attention will be given to ensuring organizations led by LGBTIQ+ persons, women, people with disabilities, and other underrepresented groups receive support and encouragement to apply to the Fund.
• Applicants must apply as a team, usually as part of an existing grassroots, community-based or refugee-led organization.

Assessment Criteria

• The main criteria to be followed during the selection process will be:
  • Challenge framing: How well the challenge is framed and whether the views from community members and relevant stakeholders have been captured.
  • Novelty of the idea/solution: Whether similar solutions exist or not.
  • Value for community: Potential positive impact on the identified community(ies) if the proposed solution is successful.

For more information, visit Refugee-led Innovation Fund.