Innovation in DRC

The Co-LIVE initiative is working to develop and test a community-led methodology that enables displacement-affected and host communities to identify priorities, co-design solutions, and influence decisions on their living environment. The Co-LIVE approach moves from externally defined needs and sector-based delivery towards community-led, integrated, people-centred place-making.

The challenge:

The traditional approach to SWI programming means designing for communities: DRC-conducted needs assessments, sector-designed solutions, externally made funding decisions, and community participation limited to predefined processes. Co-LIVE proposes a localised approach, enabling communities to shape their own safe, dignified and healthy living environment, leading dialogue and engagement, and co-designing solutions with DRC support.

The opportunity:

At this scoping and design phase, DRC are developing, testing, and validating the Co-LIVE methodology to enable displacement-affected communities and local actors to identify priorities and co-design integrated solutions for improved living environments. In this model, DRC provides an enabling environment for community facilitation, technical support, and quality assurance. Successful design and validation of the Co-LIVE methodology package brings the potential for a field-implementation pilot and scaling a Co-LIVE Program Model Package for diverse DRC country contexts. 

DRC with the DR Congo Cash Consortium is leading a pilot in North Kivu to develop a 'Cashless Community' model encouraging recipients of humanitarian cash to use mobile money for direct purchases instead of withdrawing cash. The project aims to contribute to a safer, more effective, and more efficient humanitarian response in North Kivu by promoting financial inclusion and reducing the risks linked to physical cash dependency. 

In response to the need for sustainable and affordable cooking energy solutions in camps across Cox’s Bazar, and following community consultations and feasibility assessments, DRC is establishing a Solar-Powered Community Kitchen targeting 16 households in a DRC-managed camp. Aiming to reduce reliance on LPG, this clean cooking intervention applies a Human-Centered Design approach, engaging women, community leaders, and households in kitchen design, governance, scheduling and planning.

The challenge:

As the protracted Rohingya crisis continues, over 1 million people in camps in Cox’s Bazar rely on the distribution of liquified petroleum gas (LPG) canisters for their cooking needs at an unsustainable cost. LPG is associated with cooking energy shortages, forcing families towards negative coping strategies; energy insecurity triggers protection risks for women and girls, increased smoke exposure and fire hazards, and environmental harm. Donors have made it clear that this scale of LPG support cannot continue and are eager for feasible alternative proposals from the humanitarian sector.

The opportunity:

DRC is working to offer dignified, safe, and green alternative options to LPG that meet the cooking needs of camp families in Cox’s Bazar. With the establishment of a solar-powered community kitchen benefitting 16 families, DRC’s clean cooking intervention addresses the recurring household-level challenge of cooking energy insecurity. Participating households’ strong willingness to use Solar Powered Community Kitchens is an opportunity to test the model’s ability to reduce LPG reliance and other coping mechanisms. The model incorporates women-only access preferences, privacy-sensitive cooking spaces, child-safe waiting areas, accessible facilities, and female-led community governance mechanisms.

This project introduces a sustainable and community-driven childcare model through a private partnership between DRC and Tiny Totos. It aims to establish six context-adapted Community Childcare Hubs that provide safe, supportive environments for children under the age of four, while creating income-generating childcare opportunities for caregivers. The project is piloted across two refugee camps and four host community settings, designed to equip refugee women with entrepreneurial training, practical tools and certification pathways to run quality care businesses. At the same time, the hubs offer structured, trauma-informed care for young children and strengthen referral pathways and child protection systems.

The challenge:

Children under the age of four in refugee-hosting areas and camps face heightened risks of violence, neglect, and exploitation. Caregivers, especially women, experience economic exclusion and have limited access to affordable, quality childcare. As a result, children miss out on nurturing environments that are essential for cognitive, emotional and social development in their earliest and most formative years. Existing childcare services in Kakuma refugee camp are fragmented, temporary or severely under-resourced, and vulnerable to shifts in external funding. At the same time, limited household resources make it difficult to develop more market-oriented care solutions. A sustainable childcare model is therefore urgently needed — one that strengthens child protection, supports caregiver livelihoods, builds local ownership and contributes to stronger community cohesion.

The opportunity:

DRC, together with private partner Tiny Totos, are piloting Community Childcare Hubs aimed at empowering refugee and host community caregivers to convert informal daycare setups into certified, sustainable, and income-generating micro-enterprises. This project is partnering with Tiny Totos to quality train local entrepreneurs in managing child-friendly spaces, along with DRC-provided training in child protection, trauma identification, and referral pathways for vulnerable cases. DRC are working in collaboration with the Department of Children Services (SDCS) and Country ECD Officers to align with national childcare policies, support registration of informal care centres and nudge for enhanced policy contexts for child protection in Kakuma of the Shirika Plan.

ProLAC is a regional, harmonised protection monitoring system created and led by DRC with NRC with implementation and data collection by 18 partner organizations across Latin America. ProLAC develops protection analysis to inform decision-makers and humanitarian responses. With this pilot initiative, DRC are developing an automated alert system for us  to improve the timeliness of protection analysis  

The challenge:

DRC has identified that it takes too long time from data collection to protection analysis and this limits timely identification and interpretation of changes in the protection environment. The inability to detect such changes quickly limits protection analysis to inform timely programme adjustments. 

The opportunity:

This pilot project aims to create an alert system based on context-specific indicators, enabling protection colleagues to analyse protection data in a more efficient way. The automated, easy-to-use system aims to allow pilot operations to quicker identify protection trends that allow programme adaptation, and more effective advocacy. Ensuring that protection monitoring data is translated into timely, actionable evidence is essential for improving protection outcomes and responses.

Green & Connected is a DRC Lebanon innovation and learning pilot supporting two Lebanese micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) through independent business assessments by Fair Trade Lebanon and tailored, short-term mentorship from Lebanese diaspora professionals. Each business is matched with two mentors who provide 8-10 hours of pro bono support against a focused roadmap covering priorities such as greener production, marketing, market expansion and import/export readiness.

The challenge:

MSMEs in Lebanon are central to local livelihoods yet remain under severe strain from the economic crisis, energy instability, and environmental degradation. While many businesses recognize the value of operating sustainably and are actively seeking growth, they face a persistent, dual challenge in pursuing green certification: lack of access to knowledge and expertise, and lack of financial capacity. Further, a significant gap exists in the collaborative ecosystem between diaspora networks, the private sector, and NGOs.

The opportunity:

Green & Connected recognises and mobilises the expertise of diaspora members to support Lebanese MSMEs. Combined with local business diagnostics, the project is establishing and testing a wider diaspora talent pool: a roster of professionals interested in short-term, skills-based assignments. Demonstrating how micro-level environmental change can be locally financed, socially, cohesive, and globally relevant, this initiative aims to provide DRC with a replicable model that unites climate action, innovative finance, and diaspora engagement within one operational framework.

Fostering innovation:

The pilot moves beyond the conventional framing of diaspora engagement primarily in terms of financial contributions, donations or fundraising. Instead, it recognises diaspora members as experts who can contribute their time, professional knowledge, networks and market insight directly to locally identified needs.  It tests the complete model, with learning treated as a core output, allowing DRC to assess whether this form of non-financial diaspora contribution is practical, repeatable and scalable.

In Ethiopia's displacement contexts, data on humanitarian needs and community priorities are often collected by external data collectors, leading to contested findings and a lack of community ownership. To strengthen participation, accountability and community-led evidence generation, DRC is piloting a Citizen-Generated Data (CGD) approach that enables crisis-affected populations to actively contribute to data generation, analysis and decision making. The initiative seeks to innovate durable solutions monitoring by shifting the power of evidence generation to the hands of the affected communities through CGD.

The challenge:

In Ethiopia, humanitarian data has become increasingly contested and difficult to disseminate, which slows down response planning and action. DRC research in 2025 also revealed systematic exclusion of the perspectives of women, youth, and people with disabilities from data collection on community priorities; both when collected by government actors, and by humanitarian and development actors. At the same time, funding reductions across the sector means that efficient, reliable data generation must urgently enable evidence-informed humanitarian response.

The opportunity:

DRC are exploring community-centred approaches to producing evidence for humanitarian response. DRC's primary data collection method — DRC-conducted interviews with affected communities — is inefficient, risks bias and isn't suited to hard-to-reach areas. To address continued access challenges — within a global humanitarian reality of diminishing funding — the Citizen-Generated Data project is developing an effective, replicable, scalable package of tools and guidelines to empower displacement-affected communities to generate data on their own context to inform anticipatory action, durable solutions or other initiative led by the communities. The project shifts the power to hard-to-reach and affected communities, by placing them at the centre of decision making, and covers the existing collection approach's data gaps.

Fostering innovation:

The innovation at the core of this initiative is the focus on Citizen-Generated Data rather than relying on information collected by DRC and partners. Not only does this shift enhance localisation, empowering communities to generate data towards community-driven action – it also strengthens the coordination between the anticipatory action and durable solutions response platforms.

This Information Management initiative aims to lay the foundation for a co-created innovation pilot that strengthens evidence-based decision-making in Northwest Cameroon. The initiative seeks to address "data invisibility" that limits response planning and advocacy around the anglophone crisis in NWSW Cameroon, improve protection monitoring and early warning monitoring systems by leveraging existing community-based mechanisms, and enable cost-effective documentation of the crisis.

The challenge:

The protracted conflict in Northwest and Southwest Cameroon is one of the least documented displacement crises; compounded by the deprioritisation of Cameroon as a humanitarian crisis and drastic reduction of humanitarian budgets which result in vast "blind spots". As a result, humanitarian operations face a critical information gap, which triggers a vicious cycle: limited data leads to limited visibility, which attracts less funding, restricts humanitarian access, and in turn further reduces the availability of quality data.

The opportunity:

Amidst humanitarian information constraints, CSOs and community structures continue to collect fragments of information through informal channels, religious leaders, village committees, and social media; but these efforts are unstructured and disconnected from humanitarian coordination systems. This initiative aims to validate these local mechanisms towards strengthening evidence-based humanitarian decision-making through a community-based information management system that improves monitoring of protection risks, displacement trends, and early warning signals.

How can remittances – often used for daily survival – be transformed into capital for self-reliance and entrepreneurship? DRC and MicroDahab are piloting a Remittance-Based Credit Facility (RBCF) to test exactly that. The RBCF is a first-of-its-kind initiative that enables remittance recipients to use their remittance history to support their creditworthiness assessments with financial service providers.

The challenge

Somalia's economy is sustained by over $2.1 billion USD in annual diaspora remittances – exceeding humanitarian and development aid. However, these funds are mostly used for short-term basic needs, and unbanked households still struggle to access capital for starting businesses. Recipients become financially dependent on monthly transfers, while diaspora senders become burdened and frustrated by the lack of long-term impact of their remittances.

The opportunity

Fostering innovation