MEMBER OUTCOME 2023 – 2025

Innovation Challenges

Build the capabilities of innovators and organizations to design context-relevant solutions and move from idea to market/pilot readiness through custom-designed Innovation Challenges.

Innovation Challenges Prizes

TALK TO OUR TEAM

Incubators & Sprints

USAID, UNICEF, TEF, Founders Factory

OUR ROLE

IDI's Role & Contribution

IDI serves as the design and innovation lead—facilitating the sprint process, providing tools/templates and coaching, convening cross-disciplinary expertise, and strengthening business strategy, storytelling, and (where relevant) technical readiness.

Key Insight

"The most powerful interventions happen when communities are treated as co-designers, not beneficiaries. By embedding ourselves in the problem space, we uncovered the systemic roots of the challenge and built solutions that last."

The Problem

Three interlocking failures created a system where continuity of care was structurally impossible.

Fragmented care

Designing prize-based challenges targeting community waste management and plastic reduction.

Lost record continuity

Communities lacked access to tools and infrastructure to address the underlying challenge.

Invisible complications

Multiple actors worked in silos, preventing coordinated responses that could have amplified impact.

Our Approach

We apply IDI’s holistic, human-centred and systems-led methodology—grounded in behavioural insights and service design—delivered through “learning-by-doing” sprints that combine research and ecosystem understanding, problem framing, ideation, rapid prototyping, user testing, and business/pitch refinement supported by ongoing mentorship, clinics, and feedback loops.

Outputs & Results

Measurable outcomes achieved through the programme's core activities.

12,400

TONS OF PLASTIC COLLECTED

3×

Improvement in service delivery efficiency

500+

Community members directly impacted

Partner organisations engaged

85%

Satisfaction rate among beneficiaries

2 yrs

Sustained operation post-project

OUTCOME

Project Outcome & Impact

Across programs, teams leave with clearer value propositions, stronger business models, and more investable outputs—such as refined prototypes and pitches, entrepreneur growth and funding readiness through programs like Afri-Plastics Challenge & Mombasa Plastics Prize Challenge (USAID, Challenge Works, Proportion Global), BeGreen Africa (UNICEF, Tony Elumelu Foundation), and Founders Factory Africa Academy, and structured technical assistance culminating in demo-ready MVPs and investor materials.