UNICEF Innovation

UNICEF Innovation is an interdisciplinary team of individuals around the world tasked with identifying, prototyping, and scaling technologies and practices that help UNICEF's 135+ Country Offices strengthen programmes on the ground. We build and scale innovations that improve children’s lives around the world.

The Office of Innovation focuses on solutions at varying stages:

• UNICEF’s Global Innovation Centre (GIC) identifies proven solutions with the potential to be implemented at national scale in multiple countries. The GIC provides the leadership and technical support to deploy and scale these up, expanding their application by UNICEF and others from one to several countries and regions.
  

• UNICEF Ventures invests in early stage solutions that show great potential to positively impact children in the 1-2 year future. This investment comes from the recently launched UNICEF Innovation Fund, which is a pooled funding vehicle that invests in open source technology solutions coming from startups based in UNICEF’s programme countries.
  

• UNICEF Futures looks at the 2-5 year horizon to evaluate emerging and trending technologies to see how we can work with the private sector to find shared value in this future space – for companies to do better business while improving access to essential services for children. Future investment areas include: transportation and mobility; identity; learning; mobile financial services and digital currencies; and wearable and sensor technology.