INNOVATIVE SOLUTIONS: GRASSROOTS Local Innovations to Accelerate Action

Breakout session | Stage 3

Host: UNDP Accelerator Labs

Developing countries face significantly complex challenges, including multifactor poverty as well as global phenomena like climate change, pollution, and rising extremism, which must be addressed through a local lens. The session will highlight new solutions that are locally relevant and locally driven, that can be adapted, sustained, and replicated to address these complex challenges. Further, we need a robust, adaptable learning system to increase our knowledge about what works, where, and why. These solutions need to be expanded dramatically beyond the non-obvious solutions and, where possible, not just transferred but adapted across regions, SDGs, and ecosystems. This panel will discuss about traditional knowledge holders and grassroots innovators who innovate, create, and pass on knowledge and solutions to address needs unmet by policies and market access. For example, youth entrepreneurs in Sudan are creating decent work and economic growth among vulnerable groups, informal workers in Ghana are designing solutions to convert waste into valuable assets, while indigenous crafts, heirloom recipes, and ethnobotanicals are being mapped by SalikLakbay researchers in the Philippines to develop their innovations and bridge them to market. Via a panel discussion between young innovators from Least Developed Countries, scholars from the Global South, and UNDP Accelerator Lab teams from Africa and Asia, we will explore the richness of grassroots innovations, share concrete examples and stories contributing to decent work and economic growth, no poverty, and sustainable cities and communities, and demonstrate the importance of accelerating these innovations at a global scale.

Speakers

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