UNDP Ghana Accelerator Lab

We are working on the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) from the perspectives of the hard-to-reach, the informal sector, urban poor, women, and rural and cross-border communities.

The UNDP Ghana Accelerator Lab has worked on waste management using Behavioural Insights (BI), collective intelligence, and solutions mapping methods to deepen the understanding of waste-disposing behaviours and to strengthen the waste management ecosystem through a focus on informality and its pivotal role in the circular economy. This year, our challenge is to map implications of the AfCFTA for hard-to-reach and often marginalized groups, focusing on the informal sector, women, youth, urban poor, and rural and cross-border communities. We identify and test solutions for them to take advantage of economic and social opportunities. Having employed sensing and solutions mapping methodologies, we explore emerging challenges and opportunities and try to understand the drivers and trends connecting the AfCFTA and informal traders and producers. The Lab team continues to work with the winners of the COVID-19 Innovation Challenge held in 2020 to identify and support local solutions, designed to help society adjust and recover in the pandemic. We are building a learning cycle with the innovators, accompanying their lived experiences on a self-discovery journey, and are helping them to develop their innovations.