The United Nations Development Program in Bosnia and Herzegovina (UNDP BiH) officially launched the Accelerator Lab, an initiative aimed at finding solutions to accelerated development in the 21st century. It is a UNDP’s global initiative, and out of the sixty newly established “development laboratories”, only two are in Europe. Their mission is to harness the power of local innovation, collective intelligence and societal experimentation to address the complex development challenges of today.
“We decided to work with different types of professionals and communities to get new ideas, and to do things faster. Accelerator Lab is a team of people that approach the problem-solving differently and experiment with ideas to quickly learn what works and what doesn’t. In the beginning of this year, UNDP in Bosnia and Herzegovina decided to establish its Accelerator Lab as a member of the network of 60 labs for development that will share experiences, lessons learned and solutions for more efficient development at a global scale”, said Steliana Nedera, UNDP Resident Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
UNDP marked the promotion with a variety of activities, starting with the hands-on workshop on “My Neighborhood of the Future”. Seven different age groups, from preschool to the third age, created LEGO models to reflect their vision of the preferred neighborhood and its environment in the future. As a toking of appreciation, Lab will plant one tree in the “Forest of Ideas” for each participants of the workshops. This forest will be located at Betanija Park in Sarajevo.
Accelerator Lab will continue working on different social development problems, applying its learning cycle through sensing and identifying challenges, exploring and testing different interventions to come up with a portfolio of potential solutions for those problems.
Work of the Accelerator Labs is supported by the Qatar Fund for Development and German Cooperation, with partners Italian Agency for Development Cooperation and British innovation fund Nesta.
