Knowledge

We received 578 applications for 2025’s Humanitarian Innovation Accelerator, all aiming to tackle urgent emergency and humanitarian challenges. If you’re planning to run a similar programme, here are a few key insights that might help guide your approach.

2024 was another impactful year for innovation. By implementing forward-thinking innovations, country office teams drew many lessons that enabled them to learn from successful projects and from those that offered unique challenges, to avoid reinventing the wheel. This will ultimately lead to programme improvement to better serve vulnerable communities. Below are the key lessons that country office and regional office teams learned in 2024.

What happens when a humanitarian organization and a tech company unite to tackle some of today’s most pressing challenges? Since 2020, the World Food Programme (WFP) has partnered with Netlight through the WFP Innovation Accelerator, combining expertise from humanitarian fields, innovation and technology to drive impactful change. The goal: harness data and analytics to transform how humanitarian aid reaches those in need.

A look at the design, insights and reflections from an inspiring in-person bootcamp week in Munich, featuring ten climate innovation teams and WFP colleagues from the Middle East and North Africa region.

Fostering a culture of innovation throughout WFP not only paves the way for transformative solutions but also ensures that the organization can adapt to emerging challenges and maximize its operational efficiency and impact on global hunger relief.

Discover how WFP Innovation Accelerator together with WFP country offices in Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt is sourcing, supporting and scaling regional climate innovations.

The WFP Innovation Accelerator supports innovations working in some of the most difficult contexts around the world, reaching the most vulnerable populations with innovative solutions to humanitarian and development challenges. Discover the key challenges ventures in these contexts face and the unique strategies successful ventures have used to overcome them.

The Kofi Annan Award for Innovation in Africa innovation bootcamp brought together nine venture teams working to improve food security in Africa for four days of developing and refining their solutions and business models. Here’s how we provided a best-in-class learning experience for them.

WFP Innovation Day welcomed innovators from around the world to celebrate WFP’s long legacy of innovation and build momentum for the future. Discover what we learned from our global colleagues and partners below.

The journey of innovation is marked by its trials: the pivots, the failures, and the inevitable changes that challenge our strategies and assumptions. Yet, it is precisely these experiences that lay the foundation for growth, inspire innovative thinking, and catalyse further advancements. In this Year in Review 2023, we share 24 lessons learned across our activities and innovations that can be useful for any public or private sector innovation team and humanitarian and development organizations.

Discover key learnings from the World Food Programme’s experience implementing SheCan, an innovative finance initiative that supports smallholder farmers and micro-entrepreneurs to promote food security and financial inclusion in emerging markets.

A baseline and endline survey are important review processes for any innovation initiative. Conducting these surveys will allow you to evaluate the outcomes of your project on your target population. In this short guide, we detail how to collect, analyse and use outcome data to review your innovation progress.

This guidance manual offers unique insights and lessons learned for scaling highly impactful innovations based on our experience implementing WFP's Scale-Up Enablement Programme - one of the first within the United Nations to enable innovation scaling since its launch in 2019.

Starting a company is always a risky business. Yet, some ventures operate in environments that are particularly unpredictable. Establishing a scaling strategy or following a clear growth plan can be challenging when key external factors - political, economic, or environmental - are volatile. Moreover, contextual instability leads to a scarcity of financial and human resources, while the pressure to succeed increases. With these challenges in place, how do ventures still manage to scale under uncertainty?

In this article, we share our top 5 tips and lessons learned on designing a corporate innovation function based on the experience of the WFP Innovation Accelerator.

Pivots, failures and change are an inherent part of the innovation process. Lessons learned from responding to these challenges give ground for growth and innovation. Discover our 18 lessons learned from 2022 focused on enabling factors for innovation scaling, designing data-driven programmes, exploring emerging technologies and new financing models, and more.

Explore our unique lessons learned from 2021 - on designing effective innovation programmes, sourcing impactful innovations from around the world, and leveraging new ways of working to enhance our operations.

Discover our unique lessons learned from 2020 as we adapted our programmes and operations to become a fully virtual innovation accelerator amid the pandemic.

Read inspiring stories of two innovative ventures that have achieved impact at scale after participating in acceleration programmes created by WFP’s SDGx Acceleration unit and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

As an early adopter of blockchain in the humanitarian and development sector, WFP is exploring further opportunities to trailblaze on this front. Here’s some of our recent blockchain projects that can change the game for good.

WFP explores responsible, sustainable, and inclusive uses of AI as part of its Frontier Innovations Programme, which seeks technological innovations that can enhance humanitarian work. Learn how 5 innovations powered by artificial intelligence are adding value to our work.

Learn about SKAI, an AI-powered tool co-developed by WFP and Google Research that automatically analyses satellite images to assess damage from disasters.

Global Programme Manager of PRISM, WFP's climate monitoring system, shares insights about the project's development and why it was important to make the technology open-source.

Five reasons why we believe supporting regional innovation is the way forward to building food systems that cater to everyone.