CALL FOR PROPOSALS: ADOPTION LEARNING PARTNER

OVERVIEW

A significant portion of HIF’s funded innovations are in the pilot stage of development and share a common challenge in progressing beyond this initial stage to achieve broader adoption and impact. Overcoming this challenge requires collaborative efforts beyond the individual innovation teams.

Recognising the need to address this bottleneck, the HIF has designed Adoption Challenges as a funding mechanism to strategically work with the demand side for new solutions: the potential adopters of innovation – operational humanitarian actors – rather than individual innovators. The core objective of this mechanism is to incentivise and support humanitarian organisations to integrate effective innovations into their programming. The mechanism also seeks to facilitate the adaptation of these innovations to diverse settings and the subsequent evaluation of their effectiveness. By shifting the focus from innovators to adopting organisations, the Adoption Challenges aim to catalyse the scaling and integration of innovative solutions within the broader humanitarian sector to improve outcomes for people affected by crises.

OBJECTIVES

We are currently running two Adoption Challenges. One aims to support the adoption of Water, Sanitation & Hygiene (WASH) innovations, while the other supports the adoption and scaling of humanitarian innovation in very high severity contexts.

The purpose of this Call for Proposals (CfP) is to commission an evaluation of the effectiveness of adoption as a scaling strategy for humanitarian innovation. Through delivery of the objectives below, we aspire to contribute substantively to the ongoing discourse on humanitarian innovation, fostering a nuanced exploration of adoption’s potential and challenges within the humanitarian sector.

The project has four main objectives:

• Evaluate existing grants: to evaluate the overall progress of the six adoption grants in terms of what worked well and what were the enablers, in addition to what did not work well and what were the barriers.
• Evaluate the role of partnership: to dive deep into the complex partnership dynamics which develop and evolve between the different stakeholders involved, particularly the innovation teams and the adopters.
• Recommendations for humanitarian innovation programming: to translate the nuanced understanding of the position that scaling through adoption occupies within the broader spectrum of humanitarian innovation scaling into actionable recommendations.
• Inform and engage: to plan and implement a suitable dissemination plan that reflects the depth and breadth of the learning outcomes.

TIMELINE

The intended start date is early March 2024 and the period of implementation of the contract will be until end of February 2025.