Community-Led Innovation Toolkit

Putting Communities at the Heart of Humanitarian Innovation

This toolkit is a practical guide for organisations seeking to design and deliver community-led innovation programmes. Developed through years of experience across diverse humanitarian contexts, it offers a structured yet flexible approach to shifting power, enabling communities to lead in identifying local challenges and designing solutions that are rooted in lived experience, local knowledge, and cultural relevance.

What’s inside?

The toolkit walks users through five key phases of the innovation journey, from programme setup through to sustainability, and includes 26 tools that support everything from community engagement and risk mapping to idea development, prototyping, and scaling. Each tool includes step-by-step guidance and reflection prompts to support both strategic decision-making and hands-on facilitation.

Who is it for?

The toolkit is designed for:

Programme teams and managers, looking to strategically plan and manage community-led innovation initiatives;

Community innovators, who are developing context-specific solutions to humanitarian challenges.

How should it be used?

The tools are adaptable and intended to be modified to suit local contexts, cultural practices, and available resources. They can be used sequentially or selectively, depending on the programme stage. Organisations are encouraged to use the toolkit as a foundation for co-creating innovation processes with communities, rather than a fixed blueprint.

Why it matters

At its core, the Community-Led Innovation Toolkit supports a shift in humanitarian practice,from top-down interventions to inclusive, locally-driven change. It helps organisations move beyond traditional aid models by centering community leadership, fostering innovation grounded in local realities, and contributing to long-term resilience and systems change.

Explore the full toolkit and join the movement to make humanitarian innovation more inclusive, equitable, and impactful.