According to UNDP, the lab will help stimulate innovation and development.
"The aim of launching the lab in Zimbabwe is to tackle frontier challenges in development that the world is facing the 21st century such as climate change, migration, artificial intelligence and the informal economy,"
"The Accelerator Lab is embedded within UNDP Zimbabwe's operations, and will bring in new expertise in exploration, solutions-mapping and experimentation to UNDP's front-line work. At UNDP, we are disrupting the way we think, invest, deliver and manage to perform faster, better and at scale," the organization said.
The Zimbabwe lab will part of the 60 labs worldwide that seek to accelerate progress in the 21st century and it will be 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. Together with these partners, the Labs will analyse, in real-time, the local context challenges to identify connections and patterns to anticipate new avenues of work and to tackle sustainable development problems.
The initiative is funded by the German Cooperation and the Qatar Development Foundation, having the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation and the NESTA Foundation for Innovation as implementing partners.
