Finalist Feature: Impact Hub Dhaka
Written by Impact Hub Dhaka and GKI team members
The USAID-supported Accelerating Innovation for Resilience (AI4Resilience) Challenge supports the co-creation of solutions to strengthen the ecosystem for innovations fostering community-led humanitarian response and long-term resilience. The program is currently being piloted in Bangladesh. This article features one of ten solutions our Challenge Finalist organizations are designing and prototyping. Follow the AI4Resilience Challenge on LinkedIn.
USAID (2018) estimates that more than 50% of the Bangladeshi population lives in “high climate exposure areas,” with 31% of them subject to “very high” exposure. If it continues like this, Bangladesh will lose approximately 11% of its land by 2050 (EJF, 2018) – causing the displacement of one in every seven people in the country (Chowdhury et al., 2020).
The same study also found that climate innovators working specifically on social innovations for climate adaptation rarely work with relevant government departments. There’s a weak linkage between climate change actors and innovators, activists, and entrepreneurs. It is critical to facilitate a culture of co-creation between climate actors on advancing climate action of climate innovators.
“We need to urgently accelerate this practice of information sharing, openness, and cooperation to design innovative solutions. Truly working together to share tools, data, and infrastructure must be inherent among climate actors and innovators of climate action moving forward.”
Impact Hub Dhaka (IHD) aims to set up a pop-up community space that will welcome institutions and individuals taking climate action. It will be a collaborative space for collective problem-solving and open innovation for climate change adaptation, bringing diverse perspectives and stakeholders and giving them a physical space to ideate and test their concepts.
Follow along Impact Hub’s journey and their pop-up community space on their Facebook page and with GKI’s social media channels.
