Betterstories 1

Finalist Feature: BetterStories

Written by BetterStories 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.

According to BetterStories, the humanitarian innovation ecosystem is broken, fragmented, and not maximized for its potential, particularly the community voices, and their solutions remain untapped. After diving deep to analyze this broken system, they’ve realized:

  • The humanitarian knowledge management capacity and systems are weak. 
  • The funding for humanitarian systems incentivizes large, proven ideas rather than new, small, innovative solutions.
  • There isn’t a common platform to share information and collaborate – the voice of local actors and the community is often missing from solution design and scaling solutions.

These components contribute to the gaps in the existing innovation systems, and organizations are repeatedly carrying out the same thing.

BetterStories has been building startup communities and ecosystems across the country since 2017. Rajshahi was one of the stops made in 2022 to help galvanize the community and startups to get the needed support.

“People who can bring the biggest breakthroughs are left behind with no clear pathway to challenge the status quo”

BetterStories hopes to launch an Innovation Convening Lab where local voices will find a home. Local actors will be equipped with tools, training, and support to scale their solutions. The Lab will look for new ways of finding and funding innovative solutions to humanitarian challenges, building on previous successes, and reaching diverse solutions.

Team BetterStories

Follow along BetterStories’ journey and the Innovation Convening Lab on their Facebook page and with GKI’s social media channels.

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