InnoCentive Launches World Vision Challenge to Attract Additional Investment in Clean Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene

LONDON, July 16, 2021 (Newswire.com) - Open innovation firm InnoCentive is supporting Christian humanitarian organisation World Vision on a new challenge that aspires to find new business models that could generate billions of new investment into water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) services over the next five years. 

Lack of access to adequate WASH services has a significant impact on global health and well-being, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths each year, particularly in the rural areas of low and middle-income countries. The challenge - Leveraging Funds to Increase Investment in Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene - seeks written responses that both expand on existing financing techniques for WASH investment and generate entirely new ideas.

"A lack of financing for WASH development is perhaps the single biggest reason that so many people still lack access to clean water and sanitation," said Keith D. Kall, Senior Executive Director, World Vision. "Our five-year plan (2021-2025) projects World Vision will raise US$1 billion for investment into WASH services for low- and middle-income countries. We are utilising InnoCentive's open innovation crowd and platform in a search for a way to leverage this commitment with the hopes that we can obtain a 4-to-1 multiplier on our planned investments."

A 2019 UN-Water Global Analysis and Assessment of Sanitation and Drinking-Water Report showed that many countries with costed national WASH plans lack sufficient finance to implement those plans. Almost 90% of countries do not even have adequate finance for their rural drinking water and rural sanitation plans. This new challenge aims to maximise the impact of World Vision's WASH investments.

"The financing needed to help address global access to clean water and sanitation will not be met by a single entity, so for World Vision to use crowdsourcing to find ideas makes a great deal of sense," said Simon Hill, CEO, Wazoku. "The InnoCentive crowd and platform has a wide variety of solvers with a broad background of expertise in addressing this type of challenge, and I'm excited to see what they come up with."

InnoCentive, a Wazoku brand, is the Open Innovation Marketplace component of Wazoku's Enterprise Innovation Platform, a suite of tools to power innovation at scale across global enterprises. InnoCentive has a long history with NGOs, nonprofits, and businesses, who benefit from the expertise of its global network of nearly 500,000 registered expert problem 'Solvers' and 75%+ success rate in addressing challenges.

InnoCentive's partner SeaFreight Labs, a crowdsourcing consultancy that delivers solutions to the global seafreight community, supports this challenge as part of SeaFreight Labs' commitment to the Pledge 1% movement.

"This challenge is soliciting something unusual from the InnoCentive crowd," said Harry Sangree, Founder and CEO, SeaFreight Labs. "World Vision is searching for business-model innovation in what I think of as a 'feeding the 5,000' kind of problem. Just as Jesus multiplied two fishes and five loaves into enough to feed 5,000 people, World Vision is looking to greatly multiply their planned WASH investments so that multitudes of additional people might benefit from improved water, sanitation and hygiene services (WASH)." 

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For further information about Wazoku, https://www.wazoku.com

For further information about InnoCentive, https://www.innocentive.com/

For further information about SeaFreight Labs, https://www.seafreightlabs.com/

For further information about World Vision, https://www.worldvision.org/

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Source: InnoCentive