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UNDP Accelerator Lab in Kazakhstan
The realities. What's new?
The dynamics and complexity of today’s development challenges are fundamentally different from the previous eras in history. A new breed of such challenges is emerging, and, thus, the development community needs new ways of addressing them. It means to harness the potential of locally sourced solutions, rapid test them to learn which ones work, and can grow, and which ones don’t, bringing experimentation to the core of its work.
UNDP Accelerator Lab network: reimaging development work
In 2019, UNDP built the world’s largest and fastest learning network of Accelerator Labs on sustainable development challenges. The network started with 60 Lab teams covering 78 countries and is now expanding to 92 Labs in Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia and the Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean.
The Accelerator Labs are a new service offering that works with people, governments, and the private sector to reimagine development for the 21st century. They are designed to close the gap between the current practices of international development in an accelerated pace of change.
Together with local actors, the Labs identify grassroots solutions and validate their potential to accelerate development. Solutions can come in many different forms, from a farmer discovering a new way to prevent floods to a nonprofit that is particularly impactful.
The Accelerator Lab in Kazakhstan
We launched the UNDP Accelerator Lab in Kazakhstan in December 2020 to serve as the country office’s Research & Development arm. It aims to bring new ways of addressing complex development challenges through testing and scaling up new solutions, backed up by evidence and practice.
Sense-making, collective intelligence, solutions mapping, and experimentation will be part of the new offer from UNDP to the Government of Kazakhstan and other partners in the country.
Check our latest blog post
Meet our team
We have looked for innovators, thinkers and people with relevant skillsets to become team members of our Accelerator Lab.
Aizhan Kapysheva - Head of Solutions Mapping
Aizhan’s role is to lead the Accelerator Lab’s efforts in community immersion through designing field research and participatory methods. Her goal is to map grassroot innovations and analyse systemic needs these innovations address. She will be working with a wide range of partners to tap into bottom up solutions. Aizhan is bringing her public policy experience and skills in development programming, qualitative research and policy innovation to this role.
Yerassyl Kalikhan – Head of Exploration
Yerassyl focuses on the discovery and sensemaking of emerging trends, implications for systemic impacts and risks, and their potential for accelerating progress toward SDGs. His work feeds into the portfolio of experiments ensuring the Accelerator Lab’s initiatives’ coherence with the emerging risks and opportunities and connects local dynamics and solutions into the broader national and international ecosystem of potential funders, partners, and allies thereby increasing the chances for acceleration. Yerassyl brings his knowledge and experience in innovative approaches such as prototyping, lean start-up, design thinking, and collective intelligence to his current role.
