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Mobile for Humanitarian Innovation Annual Report 2024

Introduction

2024 was another year of rising humanitarian need driven by conflict and climate shocks. The GSMA Mobile for Humanitarian Innovation (M4H) programme responded by strengthening our efforts to build responsible digital ecosystems. In 2024, we did this through:

Innovation

Launching new rounds of innovation funding to support innovators, like startups and NGOs develop safe and effective humanitarian solutions.

Influence

Playing a key role in two major global initiatives – Early Warnings for All (EW4All) and Connectivity for Refugees – by implementing regional and national projects and influencing the debate in global forums.

Cooperation

Enabling multi-stakeholder cooperation in disaster preparedness and response through the Humanitarian Connectivity Charter, including hosting workshops in Kenya, the Philippines and Pakistan.

Partnership

Working with mobile industry, government and humanitarian partners to identify shared opportunities in Tanzania and Kenya, and expand partnerships in Rwanda, Nepal and Burundi.

Analysis

Producing evidence-based thought leadership on connectivity in crisis, inclusive risk communication and minority language inclusion for humanitarian action.

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Our impact to date

The M4H programme has achieved the following through our innovation funding, partnerships, thought leadership and convening.

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18,133,592

people reached

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humanitarian innovation fund rounds launched

countries where innovation fund projects have been implemented

active innovation fund grantees

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£36,639,144

total crowd-in funding

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£6,920,765

total funding distributed

innovation fund grantee alumni

strategic partnerships formed

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thought leadership pieces published

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171

events and high-level convenings attended

Three themes that guided our work:

Anticipating and responding to disasters
Understanding and providing connectivity in crisis
Putting inclusion at the centre of our approach

Anticipating and responding to disasters: Early warnings and anticipatory action

Mobile technology is at the forefront of global efforts to anticipate and respond to disasters, which are becoming more frequent and severe. In 2024, the M4H programme engaged with the mobile industry, funded innovators, published thought leadership, supported governments and championed the global EW4All initiative.

The M4H programme brings together industry and humanitarian agencies under the Humanitarian Connectivity Charter (HCC), a set of principles and best practices for mobile network operators (MNOs) to prepare for, respond to and recover from sudden onset emergencies.

In 2024, we stepped up our engagement with MNO signatories to the HCC to address the challenges of more frequent and severe sudden-onset emergencies. Three convenings were held. Two HCC workshops brought together industry, humanitarian organisations and government stakeholders at a regional level. In January, the Asia Pacific regional HCC workshop was held in Clarke, Philippines, and the Pan-Africa regional HCC workshop was held in Nairobi, Kenya in June. The third HCC workshop was held in December, convening key stakeholders in Pakistan. This national workshop discussed challenges in Pakistan and mapped out the role of digital technology in building resilience to increased climate risks in the country.

In delivering the workshops, M4H partnered with the Philippines Disaster Resilience Foundation to support the implementation of the Common Alerting Protocol for emergency messages, and with Jazz Pakistan to improve the national early warning system.

The M4H team continued to support grantees of the GSMA Innovation Fund for Anticipatory Humanitarian Action throughout 2024. Eight grantees have been growing and scaling their digital innovations, focussing on solutions for flood early warning systems, cash and voucher assistance (CVA), displacement monitoring and food insecurity. We hosted our Asia-based grantees as part of the GSMA Innovation Fund Bootcamp in Jakarta, Indonesia, in July, and conducted field visits to Cambodia and Nepal. Grant projects will run until early 2025.

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The GSMA Innovation Fund for Humanitarian Challenges was launched in 2024 to support small and growing for-profit enterprises, including startups, with a focus on local innovators. More than 400 applications were reviewed, and 10 innovators from eight countries were awarded funding. Three grantees from this cohort are focussing on early warning systems.

At COP28 in 2023, the GSMA and industry partners pledged to support the development of early warning systems under the United Nations EW4All initiative, with eight new members joining in 2024. This global effort aims to ensure everyone on Earth is protected by an early warning system by 2027. The GSMA Director-General is a member of the initiative’s high-level Advisory Panel and the M4H programme is a member of Pillar 3 on warning dissemination and communication, led by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).

M4H contributions to the EW4All initiative in 2024 included regional and national engagement, building our support in the Caribbean and Pacific through industry bodies CANTO and PITA, and supporting development of early warning systems and cell broadcast readiness in Tanzania and Madagascar. We also published research on enhancing inclusion in mobile-enabled risk communications in South Africa and hosted a high-level Ministerial Programme event at MWC Barcelona. We continued our active membership in the Risk-Informed Early Action Partnership, co-chairing the Risk Communication Working Group and discussing its future direction at Wilton Park.

Government support and engagement in 2024 included delivering the online Role of Mobile in Humanitarian Action training course, providing support to the Southern African Development Community and Somalia on national emergency telecommunications plans and addressing the Pacific Islands Telecommunications Association (PITA) Strategy Forum.

Understanding and enabling connectivity in crisis

Connectivity is playing a bigger role in humanitarian response and the lives of those affected by humanitarian crisis.

In 2024, we shifted our emphasis to understanding the humanitarian implications of connectivity in crisis, advocating for connectivity and establishing partnerships to expand connectivity. The M4H team hosted the annual meeting of the Emergency Telecommunications Cluster (ETC) at the GSMA offices in London.

We launched our first Connectivity in Crisis report on the risks of losing connectivity, being connected and not being connected in humanitarian settings. Watch the Connectivity in Crisis video here.

As part of this research and advocacy, we worked with analysts from GSMA Intelligence to develop a methodology for estimating the humanitarian coverage gap, and reviewed different technology, financial and partnership solutions to address it. The report Connectivity in Crisis: The Humanitarian Mobile Coverage Gap was published in May 2024.

Building on this evidence base, the M4H team engaged with key stakeholders to strengthen advocacy for connectivity in crisis, including the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the ETC and the ITU.

In 2024, together with UNHCR, the ITU and the governments of Luxembourg and Spain, we laid the foundation for a complementary initiative, Connectivity for Refugees. M4H promoted the initiative and worked with our partners to produce summary reports on the status and opportunity of connectivity for displaced people in South Sudan, Ethiopia and Rwanda. With financial support from UNHCR, M4H worked with REACH and GSMA Intelligence to adapt the Humanitarian Connectivity, Needs, Usage and Assessment (CoNUA) toolkit for the Connectivity for Refugees initiative, as well as map the coverage gap and plan for data collection in Ethiopia, Chad and Iraq to inform future initiatives, partnerships and programming.

Putting inclusion at the centre of our approach

Connectivity does not necessarily benefit everyone equally, and our work has long focused on understanding barriers to inclusion and how to overcome them. Our work on inclusion was again a key theme in 2024 and included:

Delivering sustainable and impactful market engagement projects across seven countries (Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Somalia, Tanzania, Uganda and Nepal). This included delivering CVA at scale, the use of voice ID technology for the delivery of humanitarian assistance, increasing financial literacy in crisis-affected communities, providing peer-to-peer learning opportunities between countries and exploring the possibility of using mobile money agents as disaster risk reduction champions.

Launching the KUHI community of practice in Rwanda that brings together diverse stakeholders from governments, private sector, humanitarian agencies, and academia with a distinct mission: to drive digital and financial inclusion for refugees and host communities.

Publishing a research report on enhancing inclusion in mobile-enabled risk communications in South Africa.

Producing a displacement-focussed version of the CoNUA toolkit for the Connectivity for Refugees initiative in collaboration with UNHCR, to support the inclusion of refugees in connectivity initiatives.

Publishing research on minority language inclusion in collaboration with CLEAR Global, and exploring the growing opportunities of artificial intelligence language models for humanitarian action, for example, for translating digital financial services.

Expanding the reach of digital financial services

M4H expertise on digital financial services and financial inclusion continued to drive engagement in this increasingly high-profile area through:

Partnership

M4H launched and continued several important partnerships to enhance digital financial inclusion, working closely with experts in our sister Mobile Money programme.

Financial inclusion and climate resilience will be enhanced through a new partnership with eSewa, a payment service provider in Nepal, which will deploy mobile-enabled CVA, provide digital literacy training and strengthen disaster response efforts.

M4H brought together the Tanzanian and Kenyan Red Cross Societies for a peer-to-peer learning opportunity to improve their response capability to sudden-onset crises. Partnerships were initiated with the National Drought Management Authority in Kenya, and with Vodacom and the Tanzania Social Action Fund in Tanzania, to improve the resilience of the most vulnerable communities in those countries.

Through the Digital Finance for All initiative, a partnership between the GSMA Mobile for Development Foundation and Visa, the M4H programme commenced a landscaping exercise to identify opportunities for digital financial inclusion for displaced populations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which will inform programming in 2025–2026.

In Somalia, M4H collaborated with the World Food Programme (WFP) to provide digital literacy skills training to WFP cooperating partners using the GSMA Mobile Internet Skills Training Toolkit (MISTT).

Advocacy

Advocacy continued with government regulators, the mobile industry and UNHCR to expand financial inclusion for refugees in Kenya.

Working with CLEAR Global, M4H provided recommendations based on our research on minority language inclusion to promote multilingualism in digital financial services.

Engagement

The GSMA engaged with key partners and attended several events in 2024, including with the Alliance for Financial Inclusion on the financial inclusion of forcibly displaced persons (FDPs) at its Global Policy Forum in El Salvador; European Microfinance Week in Luxembourg; the CALP Network; and the IRC-led Community of Practice for Financial Inclusion of FDPs.

Looking ahead

2025 is set to be another challenging year for those in crisis and the humanitarian actors working to support them. The M4H programme will continue to build impactful partnerships between humanitarian organisations and the mobile industry, deepen our engagement and extend our outreach and influence.

These efforts will be fuelled by new partnerships, new research and new grantees of the GSMA Innovation Fund for Humanitarian Challenges.

In 2025 we will:

Continue to invest in innovation fund grantees, both new and alumni, to increase their impact and scale their innovations in new humanitarian contexts.
Facilitate new early warning systems by harnessing the power of mobile, in coordination with global partners in the EW4All initiative.
Influence and deliver results through the Connectivity for Refugees initiative, with a broader focus on improving connectivity in crisis and leveraging the capacities and resources of the private sector.

The GSMA Mobile for Humanitarian Innovation programme has been a critical founding partner with UNHCR and ITU of the Connectivity for Refugees initiative. We in UNHCR are thrilled how GSMA is bringing its unique networks and expertise from the mobile industry to further the initiative’s aims of connecting 20 million refugees by 2030.

Hovig Etyemezian Head of UNHCR’s Innovation Service

The GSMA grant has helped us pave the way for us to build the evidence of the impact of our work in innovation and technology in the humanitarian sector. Beyond the funding, the support and guidance have helped us build stronger partnerships and work on a cycle of iterative learnings in the field.

Rumee Singh Co-founder, Rumsan

The GSMA M4H programme is helping support ActionAid in advancing digital technology for the early warning system in Cambodia. Their work and support is adding huge value in strengthening effective multi-stakeholder coordination, advancing the early warning system capacity and above all helping minimise loss and saving the lives of people in Cambodia.

Siyonn Sothearith Head of Programme, ActionAid Cambodia

For the International Committee of the Red Cross, digital technologies and connectivity cannot be looked at in a vacuum as they are intimately linked to the way conflicts are fought. They create new opportunities, and everyone agrees with this, but for the ICRC we see that they create new harms and new risks for civilians and for humanitarian organisations. And to better understand all these changes, we need to have a multi-stakeholder approach and engage with the tech and mobile sector.

Philippe Stoll Senior Techplomacy Delegate, International Committee of the Red Cross

As Vodacom Tanzania advances its commitment to humanitarian initiatives, particularly in response to ongoing challenges posed by climate change, the GSMA M4H programme has proven to be a steadfast, adaptable and proficient ally. Aligned in values and objectives, our collaboration has aimed at formulating a comprehensive strategy that empowers payments, mobile and digital capabilities to effectively address the needs of humanitarian and development partners in Tanzania. The development of a Humanitarian Positioning Strategy stands as a testament to our joint efforts, leveraging the GSMA’s extensive expertise and robust research capabilities, with the unwavering support of Vodacom Tanzania.

Jacqueline Ikwabe Head of M-Pesa Business, Vodacom Tanzania

As our partnership with the GSMA M4H programme progresses, Hormuud Telecom values the ongoing collaboration focused on developing a robust humanitarian strategy. Anticipating its finalisation in 2024, the digital and financial literacy training by M4H has equipped members of our staff with enhanced skills for subscriber support. We are confident that the implementation of the learnings will lead to increased mobile service usage and revenue. We are optimistic about the positive impact on the horizon. We appreciate the GSMA’s dedication and look forward to realising the full potential of this partnership, making significant strides in meeting the evolving mobile and digital needs in Somalia.

Hassan Dahir Mohammed Communications Manager, Hormuud Telecom

The GSMA’s unwavering commitment to innovation empowers partners like us to make a lasting impact. Through their strategic support, Rumie has expanded digital learning initiatives through its low-cost, mobile-first digital learning solution. Our collaboration has ensured that mobile technology becomes a transformative force for education and empowerment worldwide.

Tanya Qadir Head of Global Programs and Partnerships, Rumie

We welcome the opportunity to widen our circle of partners and allies.

Please contact us at m4h@gsma.com

This initiative is currently funded by UK International Development from the UK government and is supported by the GSMA and its members. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the UK government's official policies.