UNDP Bhutan Accelerator Lab

We develop systems approaches to youth unemployment, citizen approaches to public service delivery and social experiments on household waste management.

In Bhutan, youth unemployment has been recognized as a national challenge in 2005 and since then different interventions have been implemented to address this issue. Given the complexity of the challenge, a systems thinking and design approach was adopted in 2020 by the UNDP Bhutan Accelerator Lab and government partners to deep dive into understanding the underlying key issues, structures, mental models that influences the system to behave the way it does. A portfolio of interconnected solutions was identified for implementation.

The Lab, in collaboration with government agencies, worked on innovative ways to engage citizens in improving public service delivery. A systems approach was adopted to gather insights on the elements that influence public service delivery. Citizens engaged in co-design, co-creation, and co-production of a portfolio of interventions to improve public service delivery. Through four experimentations, we used different intervention formats, but all were founded on the same design thinking techniques that are based on citizen (or service user)-centered design approaches.

Waste management, a scourge troubling many countries the world over, has become a growing national concern. The Lab and government partners tested three colored bins to influence household behavior to segregate waste at its source and adopted a trial method to test interventions on 600 households in a locality.