Co-creating a new fund alongside the people it will assist
The process to develop UNHCR’s Refugee-led Innovation Fund centered on the lived experiences of people who have experienced forced displacement.
Organizations led by people who have experienced forced displacement make remarkable contributions to their communities, but they face considerable challenges. Structural, attitudinal, and legal barriers can prevent them from accessing flexible and predictable funding. They are often excluded from existing networks of entrepreneurs and innovators, resulting in poor access to knowledge, information, and resources that could help them magnify their impact.
In 2021, the Innovation Service of UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, began the process of building a fund that will exclusively support organizations and initiatives led by people who experienced forced displacement, including refugees, asylum-seekers, the internally displaced, returnees, and stateless people. When the fund is launched, its primary goal will be generating place-based initiatives focused on systemic change.
Given the people the fund will serve, who better to collaborate in the design process than refugees and other people who experience forced displacement?
“The process spoke to the importance of collaborating with refugees in many aspects of decision-making,” says Dina Zyadeh, Associate Innovation Officer, who will lead the fund.
Fortunately, the Innovation Service had a wealth of expertise to tap: the winners of the 2020 UNHCR NGO Innovation Award, which recognized refugee-led NGOs working to serve their communities in the midst of COVID-19. The Innovation Service also reached out to UNHCR Country Representatives, who nominated a number of refugees to participate.
“Lived experience really matters,” says Thomars Shamuyarira, a refugee from Zimbabwe living in South Africa, who established The Fruit Basket, one of the 2020 NGO Innovation Award winners. “If a funder applies for a grant to assist us, they don’t really know what we need. I’m very grateful that UNHCR is giving us a voice — making us part of the process — so the fund is designed around our lived experiences rather than assumptions.”
Providing a space for co-creation
Using the insights and emergent visions identified in an initial research phase, the design team moved quickly to co-create an initial concept for the fund. All the meetings were via Zoom due to COVID-19, which Zyadeh considers an advantage.
“We could have people from different countries in the same workshop, which is something of a rarity because refugees don’t always enjoy freedom of movement so they can participate in international events,” she explains. “For the initial co-creation sessions, we worked closely with our design partner to prepare the events, but we made a deliberate decision for UNHCR personnel to attend strictly as observers, with the consent of participants. We wanted to remove ourselves from the workshops to ensure that the priorities and experiences shared by refugees weren’t biased by our presence. We wanted them to feel comfortable talking about their experiences, including negative ones with UNHCR and other partners.”
Imad Elabdala, a Syrian refugee living in Sweden who founded hero2b, another 2020 NGO Innovation Award winner, says he spoke up during the awards ceremony and asked UNHCR to give them a challenge.
“We are good at what we do, and they are good at what they do, I said,” he explains. “UNHCR is a wonderful organization but it can be slowed down by bureaucracy, which can make it difficult to get funds. So I was surprised by how heavily they invested in this process. Like they were really willing to change. And they made it easy for us to give input — radical self-expression.”
For Shamuyarira, it was important to give input on making any funding that’s provided as flexible as possible.
“There’s just so much unpredictability that anything can happen out of nowhere,” he says. “If you have strict rules about how the funding can be used, then sometimes organizations aren’t able to help.”
Nargis Mokhd, whose father is an Afghan refugee living in Ukraine (at the time of writing) — and created a nonprofit called the Friendship Fund — was nominated for the fund design process by a UNHCR staff member in Ukraine. Having volunteered at her father’s nonprofit for many years, Mokhd is also studying to be a lawyer.
“It was great that they organized it with a small number of participants of different ages and backgrounds, as well as from different continents,” she says. “It was cool to learn that people in Africa and Asia do very similar jobs at NGOs, because you realize you’re not the only person doing this job, like my volunteering. I was inspired by every workshop.”
Validating the initial direction
After multiple workshops, UNHCR and its design partner moved on to the next phase, which looked to validate the initial direction and vision of the fund. They developed a blueprint of what the new service would look like, and held additional workshops, this time with both refugees and UNHCR personnel.
“The objective of these workshops was for us all to check in and validate that we’re content with how this process and our new service were shaping up,” Zyadeh says. “We’re so appreciative that this community of refugees is lending us their time and experience. Throughout our collaboration, it’s important that they see their ideas and lived experience reflected in what is being built.”
In addition, the design team brought in people who weren’t previously involved in the process, to gain even more diversity of opinions. Further defying the notion that UNHCR always moves too slowly, this three-phase process was completed in three months, the timeline Zyadeh and her colleagues established for the inception phase of developing a service for people who experience forced displacement.
With some funding secured for the co-creation process, the Innovation Service is in the process of fundraising to test the initiative in a select number of countries later in 2022. A committee of refugees is being established that will develop the selection criteria for awarding grants, in addition to an equitable monitoring and evaluation framework.
The team is also working with a researcher to understand the relational ties among those providing direct support to refugee-led initiatives, including those outside of formal institutional settings. It draws on social network analysis methods to uncover existing community assets that can be reinforced, rather than duplicated, through the fund. It may also identify trusted individuals and communication channels that can be used to inform community-based organizations about the existence of the fund.
“We know it will have a more community-focused approach,” Zyadeh says. “Instead of broadcasting a call for applications, we’ll rely on local champions, including UNHCR personnel working in community-based protection who frequently interact with refugees.”
The design process also revealed the need to provide refugee-led organizations with support to engage volunteers, who they rely on to do so much of the work. Another important element is what Zyadeh describes as a flexible and equitable approach to monitoring and evaluation that is grounded in a transformative theory of change. The vision is that grantees will play a key role in determining what outcomes are important for them to monitor, rather than that decision being made by UNHCR alone.
Learning from the co-creation process
For the refugees who participated in the design process, it was also a learning experience that could benefit refugee-led organizations moving forward.
“Even after the first workshop, I had a pretty clear idea of what projects I can prepare for this fund or tell my colleagues about,” Mokhd says. “It was effective for us as participants because I wouldn’t know how to submit an application before. Now I can take this risk and hopefully make a project or teach others how to do so.”
It was a learning experience for Zyadeh, too. First, she learned, it’s important to recognize that any design process, as participatory as it may appear, should consider and address the imbalance of power among the co-creators. As someone facilitating the process, but also working on behalf of UNHCR, she saw the need to carve out ample space for people who experience forced displacement to share their nascent visions of the future. Second, it’s easy to underestimate the time and effort such a process deserves, given that success hinges on building and nurturing trusting relationships.
“Meaningful participation isn’t about individual, isolated actions,” she adds. “To me, it entails having a consistent and considered approach to collaborating with communities from the time priorities are defined through to evaluating the service. Creating room to foster respectful dissent and divergent opinions is something we also sought to do, and I know we’ll keep improving our role as conveners and facilitators.”
“As an organization, and as a humanitarian community, we have commitments to the ‘localization’ of humanitarian action,” adds Katie Drew, Interim Deputy of the Innovation Service. “I see this newly evolved fund as an opportunity for UNHCR to walk the talk. Ensuring active participation throughout the fund — and importantly in decision-making processes — is a key step to strengthening our accountability to affected people.”
As for the participants, many expressed enthusiasm not only for the process itself, but for what the new fund could mean for them and their communities.
“If someone who hasn’t experienced a problem tries to develop a solution, that solution won’t work,” Elabdala says. “Once those who understand the core of the problem are co-creators, this will turn solutions into magic.”
Learn more about the outcome of this process, UNHCR’s Refugee-led Innovation Fund, here. As of June 2024, the Fund has supported more than 40 refugee-led organizations to amplify their impact.