Amman- The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) on Thursday launched the Jordan chapter of its new initiative the Accelerator Labs to speed up and scale achieving development goals, while providing national partners with new approaches to address development challenges.

The Jordanian lab will be among 60 global chapters that will find, test and scale up innovative solutions that address complex real-world problems such as climate change, social inequity, water scarcity, economic dislocations and migration.

UNDP Resident Representative Sara Ferrer Olivella said new complex challenges require new solutions, adding that UNDP Accelerator Labs seek to provide partners unconventional approaches to address development problems by tapping the power of local innovations, collective intelligence and experimentation.
“The speed, dynamics and complexity of today’s issues present us with new challenges. Our solutions need to be different, faster, more inclusive and partnerships oriented. We need to collectively assess and harness the impact of technological progress on markets, population movements, societies and the environment,” she said.

“As we witness weakening of social cohesion and people's trust in governments', institutions and each other, current approaches are not making enough progress against 21st century challenges. To address these and others to come, we require radically new approaches to drive social impact to address the complexity of human development,” she added.

Embedded in UNDP Jordan country office, the Accelerator Lab will provide national partners with a set of new services to better tackle complex sustainable development problems. The success of the lab will be seen in three ways: Influence of experimentation and acceleration on development programming, input into government policy, and spin-offs of Lab initiatives into independent ventures.

The Accelerator Lab Network will include 60 Labs serving 78 countries in Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia and the Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean. Being part of a globally integrated network, each lab will draw inspiration from both local solutions and solutions identified by the global network. 

The Labs will work on development challenges in parallel, benefiting from each other’s learning in real-time, creating a powerful collective learning effect. 

The Founding investors of the Accelerator Lab Network are the Federal Republic of Germany, the State of Qatar, represented by the Qatar Fund for Development. The founding investors will co-build the Accelerator Lab Network as a joint venture. Other Partners of the Accelerator Lab Network include the Italian Ministry of Environment and the Governments of the 78 countries that the Labs serve.