Designing a Co-Innovation Platform for Nutrition-Sensitive Social Protection
GAIN wanted to strengthen South-South collaboration and knowledge sharing across its nutrition-sensitive social protection work. While countries were developing valuable innovations, limited dialogue across contexts made it difficult for governments and development actors to learn from one another and adapt successful approaches. The project explored the design of a digital co-innovation platform that could help public-sector officials, GAIN teams and other partners exchange experiences, identify shared challenges and collaborate on new social protection solutions. Research covered Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Indonesia, providing a cross-country view of existing programmes, innovation practices and digital readiness.
GAIN wanted to strengthen South-South collaboration and knowledge sharing across its nutrition-sensitive social protection work. While countries were developing valuable innovations, limited dialogue across contexts made it difficult for governments and development actors to learn from one another and adapt successful approaches. The project explored the design of a digital co-innovation platform that could help public-sector officials, GAIN teams and other partners exchange experiences, identify shared challenges and collaborate on new social protection solutions. Research covered Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Indonesia, providing a cross-country view of existing programmes, innovation practices and digital readiness.
"Across the seven countries, there were already valuable innovations, knowledge-sharing mechanisms and digital tools, but they existed within very different institutional, technological and cultural contexts. The opportunity was therefore to design around collaboration and user needs first, with technology supporting knowledge exchange rather than becoming the starting point. Digital literacy, connectivity, trust, data-sharing concerns and fragmented governance also needed to be considered for the platform to work across diverse contexts."
Our Approach
The project used a human-centred design process to understand how co-innovation currently happens and what a useful cross-country platform would need to enable. Research teams worked across seven countries, combining in-person and remote engagement to map users, existing co-innovation workflows, positive and negative touchpoints, digital platforms and barriers to collaboration. The work also examined existing solutions and translated the findings into user and problem hypotheses to inform the platform's design and prototyping.
Outputs & Results
Measurable outcomes achieved through the programme's core activities.
Countries included in the cross-country scoping research
Core stakeholder/user groups identified for the platform
Core platform design objectives established
Project Outcome & Impact
The seven-country research covered Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Indonesia, while the proposed platform brought together government, GAIN teams, donors, private sector, research institutions, NGOs and community actors within a shared innovation ecosystem.