During Startup Tuesday the Hague, this year’s DCHI Best Humanitarian Challenge Award was awarded to Human Aid Now. Out of the seven finalists they articulated their challenge in the most compelling way. In their short video pitch they looked at future needs whilst taking the specific local context into account.
The challenge Human Aid Now faced is the unsustainable position of long term volunteers. These long term volunteers are the key in effectively managing human aid. Because of their longer stay they gain experience, learn how they can effectively manage short term volunteers, and they can create synergy with local businesses and other NGO’s. However, the position of these long term volunteers is unsustainable because they have to pay for their own basic necessities. But without these long term volunteers the other volunteers cannot work well, therefore their challenge is how to keep the humanitarians on site.
With winning this award Human Aid Now has won €10.000, sponsored by ImpactCity. This prize money will be used towards setting up a knowledge base to share and open up the knowledge of these key long-term volunteers to a wider network of organizations and volunteers.
Congratulations are also in order for the runners up; Habitat for Humanity Nederland and Mine Mark Foundation. We look forward to working further with you on these challenges! Also many thanks to our sponsor Impact City and our dedicated jury from the Municipality of the Hague, Rotterdam School of Management, and DCHI. And of course to all our seven finalists who’s challenges are still available on Source2Gather and are in need of solutions:
- Human Aid Now – Keeping Humanitarians on Site
- Mine Mark Foundation – Online Mine Risk Education
- Habitat for Humanity Nederland – Build Back Better
- AcceleratePK & doctHER – Access to Health Facilitietes for Adolescent Women
- Hable One B.V. – Re-integrating visually impaired refugees into society
- Help a Child International – Nile Plastics Cattle Camp School
- Kaalo – Wind of Change
The more time spent on understanding the challenge we are up against, the less the likelihood of developing an inappropriate solution. Both DCHI and ImpactCity strongly believe in the power of collaborating across different sectors, to gain the maximum potential expertise on offer. Often however, organisations are still struggling to harmonise their problems with appropriate partners and solutions. A key phase within DCHIs successful Accelerator Programmes focuses on clearly articulating the specific challenge to be tackled in the field. This important phase gives humanitarians the ideal business card that can help search for inspiring collaborators, and investors, in order to take a project to the next level of impact. The Award was granded based on these Evaluation Criteria which are adoptable and can be reproduced on your challenge. If you need help, do not hesitate to contact one of the DCHI team members.
- Human-Centered: Show a clear understanding of who is suffering from this problem, their current pains and motivations
- Context: Articulate where this problem is taking place, the scope of the problem and any other important contextual factors such as how this issue is currently being addressed or what approaches have been taken in the past
- Implications: Imagining and forecasting what would be the benefits of having a solution to the problem will make the challenge more engaging and appealing to the audience. Why is it important to solve this issue, and what is there to be gained?
- Problem Statement: A single statement to summarise the problem that can be universally understood. How well has the problem been defined within a single actionable statement, that leaves possible solutions open for outside input?
