UNICEF Global Sustainable WASH Innovation Hub
A global home for building, accelerating and scaling transformational climate resilient solutions for a WASH secure future.
- Globally, more than 1 in 4 people lack access to safely managed drinking water
- Nearly half the world’s population lack access to safely managed sanitation.
- Around the world, 3 in 10 people do not have a place to wash their hands with soap and water at home.
In order to achieve universal access to water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) services by 2030, global progress needs to quadruple. Achieving universal access will require WASH services to be climate-resilient to ensure their sustainability and to be available to displaced people and those living in fragile contexts.
Fostering innovation in programming and advocacy for children was identified as a key change strategy to achieve the ambitious targets of the UNICEF Strategic Plan 2022 – 2025 to help realize the child-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Through a portfolio approach, UNICEF helps ensure innovation is applied to the most pressing problems faced by some of the most vulnerable children and young people.
The Sustainable WASH Innovation Hub was launched in partnership with the Government of Denmark with a vision to become a global home for building, accelerating and scaling transformational climate-resilient solutions for universal and equitable access to services, addressing the full ambition of the Sustainable Development Goal 6.
The Sustainable WASH Innovation Hub focuses on:
- Building the capacity of UNICEF through country partners to innovate, adapt and adopt innovation.
- Curating a set of solutions that focus on key problems. solving challenging problems for and with children and young people (the WASH portfolio).
- Becoming a center of excellence for facilitating innovation knowledge management, by enabling innovators, academia, the private sector, partners, and countries to connect to facilitate at scale.
Learn more about the portfolio projects.
What does UNICEF expect to achieve through its WASH Innovation Hub?
The vision for the UNICEF Sustainable WASH Innovation Hub is to be a global home for building, accelerating and scaling transformational climate resilient solutions for a WASH secure future of universal and equitable access to services, addressing the full ambition of the SDG6.
- Acceleration - Innovative solutions with growing evidence of potential to accelerate results and for multi-country scale are supported technically, financially and accelerated by shared value partnerships through the WASH Innovation Hub.
- Scale-Up - A curated number of priority innovations with a proven scalable business model are included in the global WASH innovation portfolio, accelerated by the WASH Innovation Hub. These innovations have been scored using 8 criteria matrix.
Research on the intersection between WASH and Climate Change
The Hub will also support research and innovation on the links between climate change and water, sanitation and hygiene with the view to improve our understanding of the sanitation sector’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions (and how they can be minimised), or to develop better monitoring mechanisms for the sustainability of aquifers in developing countries, in the context of increased groundwater extraction.
Collaboration and Partnership
The hub will bring together a passionate community of strategic partners including children and young people, academia, private entrepreneurs, public policy makers, social development and humanitarian actors, and our global UNICEF WASH and innovation colleagues in 150+ countries.
Responding to Programmatic Challenges
How can innovation make a difference in water and sanitation?
Universal access to basic sanitation services by 2030 is the goal, but the current annual rate of progress needs to be doubled to achieve that. The provision of safe water, sanitation and hygienic conditions play an essential role in protecting human health during all infectious disease outbreaks, including the current COVID-19 outbreak.
UNICEF has identified problems that, if solved, will unlock faster progress. Innovation is key to co-creating new solutions that move beyond product focused solutions to address systemic problems like lack of handwashing stations, leaks in water networks, climate-resilient sanitation services, remote monitoring of water or wastewater systems, remote sensing and other technologies for locating water sources in water scarce environments, fecal sludge management in humanitarian settings, absence of adequate sanitation products and accessible menstrual health information for women and girls.
UNICEF Sustainable WASH Innovation Hub will source, pilot and scale transformational and frontier climate resilient innovations that respond to key programmatic challenges that, if solved, will unlock faster progress for a water secure future for children and young people.
The vision for the UNICEF Sustainable WASH Innovation Hub is to be a global home for building, accelerating and scaling transformational climate resilient solutions for a WASH secure future of universal and equitable access to services, addressing the full ambition of the SDG6 – ‘ensure access to water and sanitation for all’.
Why a portfolio approach?
A portfolio-based approach to innovation is a highly effective way of organising innovations and informing key decisions about where to invest. As with any portfolio-based approach, the strength of this approach is in how it can support teams to balance risk and reward, allocate resources across various growth opportunities and consider ‘stretch’ goals.
UNICEF’s innovation portfolio uses a modified ambition matrix to help balance risk and impact, provide insights into where we are currently investing in innovation and inform the alignment of future resourcing decisions with our priorities and comparative advantages.
The ambition matrix showcases innovation solutions in three main categories:
- Incremental Innovations: Existing products and services optimised to be more efficient and effective
- Substantial Innovations: New platforms, products, services, materials and processes scaled up in new contexts
- Breakthrough Innovations: Unproven technologies or approaches, new bets and new challenges
The portfolio does not inherently prescribe action of any kind. Instead, its role is to provoke important conversation about what the ambition of the organisation should be.