Creative Solutions for Social Impact: 2018-2019 Review

We are pleased to launch our first Creative Solutions for Social Impact: 2018-2019 Review, a digital, interactive review covering highlights from our global work in health, gender, and equality. This review also introduces our Impact Framework, designed to help us measure the value of our creative problem-solving and innovation work. As capturing the impact of this type of work presents unique challenges, the new framework is the beginning of our journey, and one that we are committed to learning from and improving on over time.

In the review, you can read stories of how we used futures thinking to support family planning advocacy in Kenya; on bringing together architects, product and service designers to rethink maternity wards in India; and on applying human-centered design to make sexual and reproductive health services youth-centric in Nebraska, USA; among others. In addition, as much as this review is a look back, it is also an opportunity for us to look to the future.

Our Commitment to Impact

A major focus moving forward will be implementing our new Impact Framework across all of our work. Measuring the impact of creative-problem solving and innovation processes is important, but it is also challenging. In developing the Impact Framework, we felt it was critical to measure not only outcomes, but to also capture the value of creativity, innovation, and participatory processes. This is important considering that these benefits often include increased ownership, mindset changes, and increased inclusion of underrepresented populations in the design of interventions that affect them.

Our Impact Framework represents a starting point that we will continue to iterate and build upon through an inclusive and collaborative process. Implementing this framework across all of our future projects will aid us in evaluating the impact of our work, help us to learn and evolve, as well as identify and scale solutions that drive positive social change. This commitment to consistently capturing impact will furthermore increase accountability to the communities we serve, to our partners, and to ourselves.

New Approaches for a New Normal

As we share this review, COVID-19 continues to impact communities and place unprecedented demands on healthcare and social systems everywhere. In this new world, the work of the global health community, as well as social impact partners, is more important than ever. 

The crisis is disproportionately affecting the communities we serve—women and children, persons living with disabilities, elderly, refugees, marginalised groups and communities struggling to survive or make ends meet. Resources are stretched across response efforts while the need for care and support has increased exponentially. Bringing a stronger focus on monitoring and measuring impact is more important than ever to ensure we deliver for the people we are here to serve. 

While COVID-19 has laid bare flawed systems, inadequate healthcare, and insufficient social protection, it has also shown the urgent need for innovation and creative problem-solving in order to develop new solutions to these new challenges. We hope that by sharing our review at this time, we can provide examples of creativity and new approaches to inspire partners and communities driving positive change in our world.

Explore Creative Solutions for Social Impact: 2018-2019 Review