Catalysing and Scaling Innovation In Tanzania

CATALYSING AND SCALING Innovation in Tanzania: A review of approaches • Voices from the ecosystem
AMPLIFY
Impact, success, and strengths
The value of equipping innovators with the skills
to bring an idea to fruition. Amplify found that most
applicants’ ideas were not new, but they had never been
tested because the applicant lacked the tools or the
flexible funding to enable them to take their innovation
forward. Whereas many traditional donor requirements
and grant management processes direct grantees to scale
their solutions in a linear pathway, leaving little room for
experimentation, Amplify’s model gave innovators the tools
and understanding of how to turn their idea into a workable
product or service. The prototyping phase allowed grantees
the freedom to learn and fail safely through user-centred
research and rapid prototyping and testing, whilst the
flexible funding model facilitated grantees to learn on the
go and to change their strategies accordingly.
Sourcing ideas from a wide range of applicants. One
of the key aims of Amplify was to source local ideas
from local actors. The online platform was designed to
be easily accessible and promoted widely. In Amplify’s
portfolio of grantees, 65 per cent had never received a
DFID grant prior to Amplify, indicating that the majority
were from new sources or outside of DFID’s existing
network.
Encouraging collaboration not competition. Amplify
was designed as an open challenge model in order to
promote collaboration amongst organisations which are
often in competition with one another or are unaware
of the work of their peers. The online platform gave
applicants the chance to connect with each other for peer
support, to upload research findings and other resources,
to comment on each other’s ideas, and it generally
encouraged feedback and connection. The IDEO.org team
also made direct introductions between grantees working
on related challenges, enabling an organic exploration of
how they could strengthen one another’s work.
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