Catalysing and Scaling Innovation In Tanzania

CATALYSING AND SCALING Innovation in Tanzania: A review of approaches • Voices from the ecosystem
TANZICT
Above
Participants
learn about
entrepreneurial
teaching methods
at a TANZICT
workshop at the
University of Iringa.
‘living labs’, which are locally driven initiatives
where communities define the problems and
challenges to address in their environments.
TANZICT’s ‘TaFinn Exchange Programme’
provided short-term exchanges and group visits
between organisations, Tanzanian students, and
university staff in Tanzania and Finland.
Awarding grants. TANZICT’s Innovation Fund
provided financial support to products, services,
and businesses focusing on social innovation.
Forty-four successful applicants were awarded a
total of €220,000 over five rounds.
Impact, success, and strengths
Examples of the programme’s key strengths are
given below.
Adopting a people-centred approach. Openness
and transparency were core elements of TANZICT
and the programme only collaborated with
organisations that placed people at the centre of
their work. For example, the living labs were all based
on principles of participation and inclusion, with
special attention paid to vulnerable groups such as
women, children, older people, and people living
with disabilities. The Innovation Fund gave special
attention to innovations that made the everyday
lives of vulnerable people safer and more inclusive.
Connecting communities. A key component
of TANZICT’s work focused on improving the
community’s role in the innovation ecosystem by
encouraging them to participate and lead in local
initiatives designed to improve their lives. Through
the living labs model, communities and local
champions came together to decide what challenges
they wanted to address in their environment and how
they would develop. TANZICT supported eight such
labs by providing a range of services to encourage
entrepreneurship and facilitating peer learning
between the labs so innovators could learn from
each other and replicate successful programmes.
Replicating good practice. The approach TANZICT
used to improve the role the community plays in
the innovation ecosystem was to support existing
Tanzanian sustainable community organisations, and
to use proven methods such as the South African
RLabs development model, and various Finnish
training techniques and methodologies.
19