UNDP Bangladesh Accelerator Lab

We re-imagine development by exploring the potentials of the Blue Economy, designing new models for advancing the digital skills of youth and leveraging big data.

The UNDP Bangladesh Accelerator Lab is part of the second cohort of 32 Labs, officially launched in April 2021. We are accelerating progress in thematic areas of youth unemployment and gender equity by bringing expertise and creativity to solutions on advancing digital skills for youth, multidimensional poverty indicators for understanding vulnerability, ethnographic research on tourism for informal employment, and application of citizen-generated data and behavioral insights. 

The Lab elevates grassroots solutions while localizing global best practices. We build on innovative solutions by expanding on what works and experimenting on the unknown. We build collective intelligence to be shared and tools to be scaled. The Lab also provides advisory services to partners in tackling complex challenges through sense-making, horizon-scanning, solutions-mapping and experimentation services. 

The Lab is developing a micro-credential scholarship program for Bangladeshi youth to learn new digital skills and conducting explorations on employer and student perspectives on micro-credentials. In July 2021, the Lab organized the UNDP Women’s Digital Innovation Hackathon.