Southern Africa: UNFPA Esaro Launches 2023 'We Scale' FGM Hacklab

9 June 2023
UNFPA East and Southern Africa (Johannesburg)

Imagine a world where every idea has the power to change lives, where young visionaries like you can shape the future. We've already witnessed the immense potential of UNFPA East and Southern Africa Regional Office's Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) Hacklab. We've identified over 300 groundbreaking, innovative solutions that are igniting a spark of hope for the 10-year-old girl to live a safe and fulfilling life. With over $150,000 in seed funding and targeted enterprise growth support, we are working towards transforming these solutions into real-world accelerators of the UNFPA Transformative Results, which are to improve maternal health, promote access to family planning, eliminate harmful practices, and advance the rights and well-being of individuals, especially women and girls. Innovation works!

UNFPA in East and Southern Africa, with support from the UNFPA-UNICEF Joint Programme on the Elimination of FGM and the Spotlight Initiative regional programme in Africa, announces the launch of the 2023 Harmful Practices 'We Scale' Hacklab - an initiative aimed at investing in and scaling up UNFPA-supported social innovation solutions across Africa. The We Scale Hacklab builds on the successes of the 2021 and 2022 Hacklabs, and presents an opportunity to amplify our impact in ending FGM and harmful practices for women and girls.

The 2023 We Scale Hacklab aims to take this progress to new heights. Our primary objectives include:

Providing additional capacity strengthening (technical and financial) to a network of innovators and innovation hubs that have been engaged in the previous years' hacklabs;

Mobilizing community support within the innovation ecosystem, enabling innovators to lead the movement advocating for individuals' right to make decisions about their own bodies, both locally and nationally;

Provide digital tools, such as the social innovation toolkit, to accelerate business growth;

Evaluate and communicate the impact of the innovative solutions implemented;

Identify and engage a network of innovation enablers to provide sustained support to innovators.

The We Scale Hacklab will engage innovators selected from among the final pitch event cohorts of the 2021 and 2022 Hacklabs, who have demonstrated a continued commitment to growing and developing their innovative solutions. Through an evaluation process, the innovators will receive additional training in scaling up and engaging with markets and stakeholders from AfriLabs - UNFPA ESARO's business incubation partner - and will present their scale-up plans to an expert panel. Two solutions will be selected as winners and granted additional scale funding ($15,000) to expand their impact. Additionally, the innovators will benefit from business scale support, Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) and gender programme design technical assistance, connections to UNFPA country offices, and mentoring support.

Read the original article on UNFPA.

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