Promoting public and social innovation capacities for development 

Our challenge is to promote and scale up public and social innovation at national and local levels, regarding main development challenges at national and local levels. 

Since its beginning in 2019, the AccLabPY has centered its efforts on social and public innovations, with a strong focus on capacity building. Several initiatives took place in these first 5 years, with a strong impact and many lessons learned.     In the public sector, the challenge of increasing the capacity of innovation is directly related to the need and path to deliver better services and outcomes, and, therefore, to the strengthening of democracy and citizen wellbeing.     All the latest evidence, such as the ones presented in the 2023/2024 Human Development Report “Breaking the gridlock” and the 2024 UNDP Trends Report “The Landscape of Development”, shows that the deepening of inequalities is undermining democracy, leading to most of the half of the world population supporting leaders that area eroding democracy.    At the same time, the public sector is facing a big challenge with the arrival of IA, both in its internal and external relations and outcomes. The need to innovate in the institutional, social and technological dimensions is a strategical necessity, to improve the quality of their outcomes and to respond to the contemporary problems of the citizens, including the need for a better and more direct relation and participation.  The capacity of the public sector to innovate depends on how much research, development and innovation tools and methods are integrated into government functions, mechanisms, and human capital.     To face that challenge, since 2019, the AccLab has been working closely with Paraguay’s National Innovation Strategy (ENI), a cross-cutting public-private initiative that is working to promote a better change within the system. Another key ally is the National Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT), who has committed significant financial resources to carry out the capacity building programs that will strengthen scientific capacity, as well as directly supporting different forms of innovation.     As a result of this alliance, the Public Innovators Program was born, in 2021. The Program builds capacities in public officials from several national institutions, with intense training, mentoring and pilot development. In its first edition, in 2022, the Program worked with 50 public officials and developed several pilot projects. In its second edition, in 2023, the Program trained also 50 public officials, and implemented other pilots. For this year 2024, there is a third edition in design, with some improvements based on the previous editions, aiming to train 50 public officials and to develop new pilots.     In this new edition, the Program includes academia and private sector as new key actors, within the public institutions, and is consolidating its institutionality within the Ministry of Information and Communication Technologies, where the ENI is now hosted. The role of the AccLab in this process is key, been the articulator and a technical and institutional support to the Program and its scalability.     Also, new stakeholders are being part of these challenge this year: the local government, with whom the AccLab is going to work on innovative methodologies to deliver better services and outcomes; and the OAS, to cooperate strengthening the innovation capacities in the local governments.     On the other hand, social innovation rises as a key answer to the main development and democracy problems. The 2023/2024 HDR emphasized that most of the population felt they had no control over their future, highlighting the need to strengthen our governance mechanisms and collective resource ownership.    Furthermore, the study on social capital during the pandemic conducted by AccLabPY showed that community management of collective assets helps strengthen trust, and consequently, enhances institutional capacity and democracy, positively impacting the quality of life and well-being of individuals.    Moiru, a Communitarian Social Innovation Challenge leaded by the AccLabPY and the Ministry of Foreing Affairs, in its SDG Comission, showed in its first and second edition, in 2022 and 2023, the power of social initiatives for social innovations.     Several projects were presented in the two editions of the Challenge, with innovative and disruptive ideas to catalyze development and bring solutions to main local problems. Aiming for a third edition, we are diversifying the partners, seeking new alliances in the private sector, to scale up the initiative.     Also, contemplating the goal of keep innovating and finding new learnings for the main challenges, by analyzing the 2024 Trends Report and alienating it with the national and CO priorities, we started a new initiative regarding renewable energy, mapping the experiences of communities and local governments generating renewable energy.    Paraguay is a world example of renewable energy, but, also, an example of main challenges that many countries worldwide are living facing the energy transition. It generates 100% of its electricity by hydroelectric, but, contradictorily, it uses more biomass and oil than hydroelectric.      Even though Paraguay has always been characterized by an overproduction of energy, that led to its main energy cession to its neighbors, in the next 10 years, or even less, Paraguay will face a lack of energy, by using the total of it currently production, and facing the need to import, if there are no changes made.    The main data is that, regarding the projection of depletion of local energy sources, by approx. 2033, demand will surpass supply with a possible acceleration due to a hydrological crisis and increased electro-intensive consumption.  With the main stakeholders in the Vice ministry of Mines and Energy, local governments, cooperatives and communities, we are looking forward to exploring the main experiences at national and international level regarding renewable energy generation and to run pilot projects in urban and rural communities to generate renewable energy from a local-led approach.

The AccLabPY is adding value and can still add more value to this challenge, by leading key actions in these three main levels:  Building a strong cooperation network both at national and local levels, with main government actors, and social civil society, acting as an articulator of the network and empowering the actors to be the process protagonist.  Linking local and national needs with worldwide challenges, learning from the global lesson learned in the subjects; and   Co-creating and making innovation happen, fostering the public and social capacities and catalyzing the national and local processes with pioneer ideas and projects.   This approach of promoting local-led innovation, strengthening the public and social capacities and improving the outcomes with pioneering pilot projects is what makes the AccLab a key actor the work on this challenge.  Also, the challenge has two different levels, that the AccLab can manage: 1. The scale up initiatives in these challenges, the Public Innovators Program in its third edition, and the Moiru Communitarian Challenge, also in its third edition; 2. The new exploratory projects, one related to public management in local governments with the OEA, and the other one reagrding renewable energy generation in local communities.

By scaling up successfully programs such as the Public Innovator Program and the Moiru Challenge, and exploring new findings with the renewable energy initiative, capacities for Innovation in the Public and Social Sector are being strengthened at the national and local level to promote development.  

How to increase capacities in national and local government and civil society stakeholders to promote, design, implement, document and scale up public and social innovations initiatives for development? 

Both the Public Innovators Program and the Moiru Challenge that are going to scale up, are taking the lesson learned and good practices from the first two editions, and strengthening the human-centered design by applying the evaluations that came out as a result of the collective intelligence processes.   From these two projects, pilots are going to be designed and implemented, also with a human-centered approach, as results of a co-creation process involving collective intelligence.   In the new initiatives that are taking place this year –with local governments and regarding renewable energy-, the first step will be to identify and build a stakeholder's map, as well as an ecosystem map. Both tools will be used in the hole process, increasing the number of data collected and adding more value and insights to the learning question 

Mentoring and engagement with local stakeholders will allow us to work closely with the public officials at national and local levels, collecting public administration data and citizen perception data from the key actors. The inside insight is an existing gap in data, where there is no public information available. Collecting this information will provide main data from reliable sources to better understand and act in improving public capacities for innovation.   Also, these two new types of data will be used with social organizations and communities, allowing to collect main information regarding the local experiences, social trust and need for innovations and/or scalation of the existing grass-root innovations.  Future analysis will present a better understanding of the scenario and its projections, such as the IA and bid data use in the public sector, the energy transition challenges and the local governments outcomes. These indicators will be crucial for the initiatives to have a real impact by promoting innovations capacities regarding the future trends and scenarios.   Geospatial data is going to frame all the collected and generated data on a visual map for its prompt identification in physical and territorial space, and its linkage with other indicators and initiatives that can be geospatially located. 

The Public Innovators Program and the Moiru Challenge are entering their third edition, as projects in the process of scaling up.   The Public Innovators Program has a well-established inter-institutional alliance between ENI-CONACYT-UNDP and financial support from CAF-BID, becoming institutionalized within MITIC and CONACYT.   Meanwhile, Moiru has an established brand and generated good practices, with winning projects that have been sustained over time through self-financing.   In this third edition, the central challenge will be to consolidate a new alliance for its development, as the polarized political scenario has led the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to eliminate the ODS Commission, which carried out the Competition.   In this regard, partnerships with the private sector are being explored, with initial exploratory meetings already held with potential financing partners.  For initiatives with local governments, the work with municipalities already has years of experience, with this innovation capacity project to be developed being something new to add to this framework.   The alliance with the OAS will complement the existing training with innovative methodologies and substantial institutional support from the OAS. New partnerships for resource mobilization will be necessary, which will be worked on jointly with the municipalities and even OAS.  Regarding the renewable energy initiative, in this initial exploration phase, potential allies are also being explored, such as the UNDP Energy Hub, the global network of Labs, and other Acceleration Labs with experience in the field, national specialists, and counterparts such as the VMME.   It is projected to establish links with IFIs that are working on the subject, specifically CAF, the World Bank, and the IDB.  Additionally, alliances will be established with non-conventional actors who can provide interesting experiences for the project, such as cooperatives, social organizations, and local governments.