After 6 months of joining the Accelerator Labs and reviewing the Bootcamp material, today we want to share from our own path lessons and perspectives on “innovation and acceleration”.

Innovating? There are many books, courses, lectures on this subject, but how do we apply innovation to our daily lives and to our work? Specially if we focus our efforts towards Sustainable Development. Well, it´s a great start to join events like Istanbul Innovation Days 2021, where many innovators from different backgrounds came together to share their latest initiatives to achieve the SDG’s.  As a Guatemalan, I was very excited to participate in the case study opening and live session on Guatemala City Reimagined: cities re-think relationship with nature and technology where we were able to navigate as avatars in a recreated Guatemala City (3D) built by layers of urban and geographic data.  In this space the dynamics of nature were integrated using artificial intelligence analysis, developed  by Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto from ecoLogicStudio. It was enriching to expand my knowledge about the possibilities of future urban infrastructure considering more ecological spaces and systems, sewage management, waste collection solutions, responding to local topographic conditions and strengthening the relationship with nature.

The UNDP Accelerator Lab together with the Poverty and Social Investment Portfolio Team is fostering the connection between innovators such as ecoLogicStudio with decision makers in public institutions such as the Municipality of Guatemala. By weaving in new networks, stakeholders can also learn in faster ways to new approaches using technologies to accelerate change; in particular SDG 11^th  aiming for inclusive, safer, resilient and inclusive cities and human settlements.

In 2016, the TECHO organization identified 161 informal human settlements in a 220km² territory, which are located mainly in the ravines; It is estimated that 10% of the total population (995,393 in 2018) of the municipal territory lives in settlements. This has led to other socio-economic challenges, of which the main ones related to the environment are water supply and underwater recharge, water sanitation and solid waste management. Currently, the Municipality of Guatemala and civil organizations are working on the Ecologic Metropolitan Belt, leveraging the ravines that penetrate the urban tissue to strengthen the network of environmental services. This project is also associated with the proposal for greener systems for Guatemala City presented by ecoLogicStudio. These actions allow us to make visible the connection and the link between local and international actors with diverse skills, talents and perspectives, allow us to build “collective intelligence”, open ourselves to innovation in a more agile way and build new tissues.

So, why is learning to bike important, particularly if you´re an adult? Well, as UNDP Accelerator Labs, we can help facilitate exchanges with policy makers, public institutions´ personnel, decision makers and innovators.  And how do we also innovate as Acc Lab members?

After these months of getting to know UNDP globally and locally, learning from Labs and Honeybee networks, plus understanding Programmatic Areas and Operations´ work, the question is now stronger. How do we apply innovation, acceleration and contribute to the Country Office? So here is a suggestion for anyone looking to innovate, let's learn by doing!

If we think about how we learned to bike, it was not by reading a manual, or a book, or even by watching YouTube (when I learned, the Internet did not even exist yet). You just took the bike, sometimes with a little support from auxiliary wheels, and you tried to keep your balance with each pedal stroke. Of course, I fell many, many times. The scratches and some scars were proof of my willingness to be free to go anywhere with my bike: It made me feel like an adult! A few decades later, today I reflect on this analogy of learning to innovate as you learned to ride your own bicycle. Being a girl or a boy, you feel more encouraged to try, you understand that you can fall, but fear is not enough reason to stop trying and have fun.

Why is it more difficult to learn something like that as an adult? Fear of failing can be one of the main reasons, perhaps we blush when we fail in the first attempts? But how else do you learn? When it comes to Sustainable Development, driven by the UN and its agencies like UNDP, failure can seem costly (time and resources), or not seem smart enough for a global organization. However, Acc Labs are a bet on innovation, and we must consider failure as part of the process.

Remembering the nature of Accelerator Labs, our purpose is to learn fast about what works and what doesn't, we´ve the power to learn to ride a bike again! And it's not just about keeping your balance; As you go along, if we can practice enough, we could speed up and reach our destination - applying new ways to achieve the SDGs!

Now, having faith in that girl or boy who did not mind the bumps or scratches when riding a bike,  as a Lab, we´re launching our first Ideathon to innovate the transport compartments of recyclables in the "Yellow Waste Collection Trucks". We´ve already acknowledged the separation that takes place in the trucks during the routes, now we´re trying to find better ways to carry the organic and inorganic material inside the trucks to improve the existing (informal) recovery chain, as well as the conditions to informal workers who earn a living from these activities.

Taking as a reference our project presented in the course "Management of Inclusive Innovations for Social Transformations" (conducted by Honeybee Network), we´ve joined forces with the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala and Fundación Crecer, leveraging this opportunity to bring together diverse actors in the waste recovery chain. Currently, we´re in the initial stage where the students are empathizing with the various actors. By recognizing the needs of collection and classification workers, co-design and co-creation could strength solutions or find new ones for the classification of waste from the source. Transporting recyclables in better conditions is important to reduce the material that is placed in the landfill, as well as reducing the use of resources when washing materials. All this will lead us to improve the health and safety conditions of this group of workers. The co-design process in groups of 4 will begin during the 3rd week of May. As Accelerator Lab, we’ll support the two best solutions by building them on 2 trucks, trying them during their routes in the hope that these solutions may be replicable after testing.

Other important initiatives are in process together with civil society and public institutions. UNDP Guatemala and Solutions Mapping are participating together with The Ocean Cleanup in this new public and private alliance to implement infrastructure as part of solid waste management in  Las Vacas River (northern metropolitan basin). We´re also betting on other small solutions to separate household waste by running pilot tests in selected communities, strengthening the network of women within the recovery chain, learning from other formal recycling solutions in the hope of scaling up these practices.

These ongoing initiatives are our way of taking the “innovation bike” and riding it in hope of mastering it! If we fail on our way trying any of these solutions, we’ll get up and get back on the bike. I am confident that we’ll be successful next time and hopefully inspire more waste generators, students, truck owners, informal workers, institutional counterparts, and many more to join in this journey to find better ways to manage our waste.

Written by:

Paola Constantino

Head of Solutions Mapping,

Laboratorio de Aceleración

PNUD Guatemala