Launched in 2020, the Community-Led Innovation Partnership (CLIP) is a collaborative programme that brings together a group of like-minded humanitarian innovation actors to explore how communities can be placed at the heart of humanitarian response.
The Community-Led Innovation Partnership (CLIP) program supports the creation, scaling, or adoption of locally-driven solutions identified and designed by people affected by crises and is actively pushing to realize humanitarian responses that meet existing humanitarian needs in a dignified, sustainable, efficient, and effective way.
The Community Led Approaches to MEAL Grant enables people affected by or at-risk of crises to have more of a say in monitoring, evaluation, accountability and learning.
Humanitarian innovation has rapidly gained a central role within humanitarian policy and practice as a way of addressing intractable challenges. An increasing number of humanitarian organisations have established innovation initiatives (including labs, challenge funds and scholarships), set up separate innovation departments and hired innovation staff.
The humanitarian sector is often criticised for being too top-down and for failing to meet the needs and priorities of crisis-affected people. ‘Innovation’ became a rallying cry for new initiatives, organisations and funding promises. Yet, three years on, the sector has been slow to prioritise and support local leadership or to create systems that allow people affected by disaster to have a hand in shaping innovations within their own communities. A recent research paper suggests that only 33% of humanitarian innovators consult with affected populations during their innovation processes. In response to this situation, several organisations have begun advocating for the use of human-centred design (HCD) in humanitarian innovation: bringing meaningful community participation into developing solutions, services or assistance for that community. The Disasters and Emergencies Preparedness Programme (DEPP) Innovation Labs is a diverse network of national and international humanitarian organisations, set up to identify and grow areas of innovation that come directly from communities affected by crises. The labs drew on the HCD tradition, with the aim of developing more responsive and locally-led humanitarian and preparedness programming.
