Pathways to Progress: Adopting Innovations in High Severity Humanitarian Settings

Scaling is one of the biggest, ongoing challenges facing the humanitarian innovation ecosystem. Despite increased investment in recent years, the pathways for integrating new and improved tools into humanitarian action are often unclear, and potentially life-saving projects regularly struggle to progress beyond the pilot phase.  

Since 2016, we have supported innovation uptake through our Journey to Scale focus area, identifying barriers at all levels of the sector, sharing tactics for uptake, and incentivising innovators and operational actors through our adoption challenges – designed to support agencies to adopt, adapt and evaluate promising new solutions. 

Last year we launched a new challenge, Adopting Innovations in High Severity Settings. In the world’s most high-risk humanitarian settings, the challenges of scaling are even more pronounced. Yet it’s these settings that stand to benefit most from new solutions, particularly those directly informed by and adapted for local communities. The challenge incentivised organisations working in acute crisis contexts to pilot any of the 140 innovations supported through the Humanitarian Innovation Fund (HIF) since 2012. 

Through this call, three innovations, detailed below, have now been adopted by aid agencies and will be implemented in some of the world’s most challenging humanitarian situations. 

SOS Children’s Villages and PM+

SOS Children’s Villages is supporting the mental health of young people and caregivers in Haiti by adopting Problem Management Plus (PM+).  

Haiti is in urgent need of mental health support. Long-running political instability, gang violence, widespread poverty and the impacts of successive natural disasters have left citizens fearful, stressed and in many cases, deeply traumatised. Despite mounting need, mental health services in Haiti are skeletal, with just 23 psychiatrists and 124 psychologists to support 11 million people. 

PM+ is a low-intensity, low-cost intervention that can be adapted to local needs, contexts and mental health conditions. Crucially, it can be delivered by lay health workers. Using a scalable ‘train the trainer’ model, SOS is training ten PM+ Helpers as trainers-of-trainers, who will then aim to train a pool of 30 more PM+ Helpers, potentially reaching 320 clients in a 12-month period. 

The innovation allows for community management of low-level mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety, reducing the burden on the public health system and ensuring those with severe mental health conditions can access more intensive clinical treatment. 

Learn more

Mercy Corps and MUAC

Mercy Corps is using simplified, standardised mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC) bracelets to aid early identification of malnutrition among young children and pregnant and lactating women in Yemen.  

Taiz, a city in the southwest of the country, has been under siege for more than eight years by opposing Yemeni forces. The ongoing civil war has left the health system stretched and inaccessible to many, while food insecurity is rife, with high rates of severe and moderate acute malnutrition in children, and pregnant and lactating women.  

MUAC is considered a strong indicator for nutrition-related morbidity and mortality in children. The measuring bracelet helps caregivers identify malnutrition in children under five and pregnant and lactating women at an early stage, leading to timely intervention and reducing the need for complex treatment. 

The Mercy Corps team is working in communities located further away from health facilities, training community health volunteers to use the bracelet, and to provide further training to caregivers, so they can monitor their own children and families’ health and nutrition.  

Learn more

Oxfam and Reemi Period Underwear

Oxfam GB is adopting Reemi menstrual underwear in Central African Republic, Mali, and Somalia, to provide women and girls with high-quality, accessible and culturally sensitive period products. 

In all three contexts, people affected by crises struggle to manage their periods safely and with dignity, due to prohibitive costs, lack of privacy, poor-quality products, and limited knowledge of good menstrual hygiene practices. These factors are both driven and further compounded by cultural taboos and stigma around menstrual blood, the use of certain period products, and the washing, drying and disposal of those products.  

Reemi has already been successfully piloted with 6,000 garment workers in Bangladesh. Oxfam will be distributing both the antibacterial underwear and discreet washing bags to 750 women and girls across the three countries, evaluating both the products’ effectiveness and the desirability among the community.  

A key component of this innovation are the education sessions delivered alongside the products. In each country, Oxfam will be facilitating culturally adapted workshops, for both women and men, to debunk the stigma and myths around periods and reduce barriers to safe menstrual hygiene management and social participation. 

Learn more