UNDP Launches Accelerator Lab In Zimbabwe

The United Nations Development Program has launches first Accelerator Lab in Zim as part of the UNDP Global Accelerator Lab Learning Network initiative.

The aim of launching the lab in Zimbabwe is to tackle frontier challenges in development that the world is facing such as climate change, migration, artificial intelligence and the informal economy.

Over 60 labs serving 78 countries are working together with national and global partners to find radically new approaches that fit the complexity of current development challenges and now one of these labs will be.

The UNDP Zimbabwe Accelerator Lab will be part of a platform that connects the Lab network to the large ecosystem of partners and external expertise that have signed up to collaborate with UNDP and support this new approach on the ground

The accelerator labs will provide a set of new approaches for addressing complex development issues which are outlined below:

Sense-making: Together with partners, the Labs will analyse, the local context challenges to identify connections and patterns to anticipate new avenues of work and act effectively to accelerate development.

Collective intelligence: Collective intelligence is the ability of large groups and machines to think and act intelligently in a way that amounts to more than the sum of its parts.

Solutions mapping: Solutions mapping finds things that work and expands on them. The Accelerator Labs will identify local innovators who have already developed solutions for their own needs or those of their peers.

Designing and Testing: The Labs will simultaneously test approaches to tackle a singular complex development problem. This systematic process allows learning to happen in weeks or months rather than years.

The Accelerator Labs should inspire us to do things differently. We expect new ideas to come out from us in the next frontier.

UNDP Representative for Zimbabwe – Georges Van Monfort