UNDP Indonesia Accelerator Lab

We strive to accelerate collective action in building resilient systems for development challenges through grassroots solutions, innovative partnerships and increasing awareness about social innovation.

The UNDP Indonesia Accelerator Lab was officially launched in March 2021. We address frontier challenges in the context of urban development and urban resilience.

As part of our initial efforts, we explore the relationship between ecological crises and inequality in urban environments, in particular on water-related issues such as flooding. To understand the complexity, we applied collective intelligence, ethnographic research using immersion, public surveys and solutions mapping.

In the process, we have partnered with the Ministry of Planning, the Indonesia Institute of Science, the Rujak Center for Urban Studies, and the Design Ethnography Lab-Bandung Institute of Technology. We succeeded in demonstrating the bottom-up policy design when these ethnographic findings were formulated into a policy brief that informed national policies in the infrastructure sector.

In addition, we also collaborated with UNESCO and UNDRR and U-Inspire Alliance in Future Thinking on Disaster Risk Reduction and delivered a series of capacity building workshops to youth and young professionals across Asia and the Pacific. This joint initiative is part of our efforts in reframing narratives around the future of disasters and resilience among regional innovation ecosystems.