Mahali Lab: By and For the Community it Serves
I could tell right away that Eva Kaplan was the best person for the job. In her desire to have more of a discussion and less of a lecture-style talk, Kaplan quickly established that she was on the same level as the audience, which allowed for a much more intimate and personal conversation. As Regional Director of Innovation, Middle East, for the International Rescue Committee (IRC), she is a large part of the Mahali Innovation Lab, a co-working space in Jordan that empowers refugees to create solutions to problems facing their communities, and her passion for the subject shone through in her xTalk on March 4.
Currently, there are over 680,000 registered refugees in Jordan, and the IRC helps such people displaced by conflict, crisis, and natural disaster by developing life-changing and scalable solutions. However, the humanitarian community’s solutions will likely differ from the refugees’ solutions, which is where Mahali comes in; the goal of Mahali is to allow impacted people to lead and define crises, creating solutions through design thinking, behavioral science, and evidence-based, analytical approaches.
Currently, Kaplan and the Mahali team are confident that impacted people have the ability to solve challenges and that refugees’ solutions are different from the humanitarian community’s solutions. However, they are still investigating whether these solutions will be more accepted by the community than the humanitarian community’s. The protracted nature of crisis makes service delivery in an urban context much different than in a camp context, and as a result, current humanitarian approaches need to be adapted to meet refugees’ day-to-day challenges.
There are four phases to the Mahali program: 1) Define (work with communities to understand their perspective of real-world problems), 2) find (seek out those best suited to solve the problem through an application process consisting of a written app, hackathon, and three week bootcamp, ultimately choosing 3-6 teams), 3) design (10 week design sprint with an entrepreneurship bootcamp embedded in the sprint), and 4) deploy (go through a 6-month accelerator program to develop ideas further).
The team has currently gone through three design sprints, gaining valuable lessons from each:
- First sprint (ensuring vulnerable populations have enough money to meet needs): every group looked at reducing expenditures rather than increasing income as the humanitarian community would have done
- Second sprint (access to health services): one group came up with an unusable and highly illegal community workaround solution that involved a medicine sharing bank where one person could pick up medicine and other people could use it. Though this was a tough problem, the group was able to then develop an innovative supply chain solution where pharmacies’ excess medicines could be bought at a discount
- Third sprint (transforming children’s environments into learning environments): This is currently in week 6 of 10. One team’s solution involves prototyping cards for deaf children aged 2 to 5, which would be available in existing child-friendly spaces and allow parents to download an app to use the cards without data; this supports parents in teaching kids when they don’t have the resources to teach them through sign language
- Teams feel better pushing forward in different directions when the money they receive from IRC is called a “scholarship” as opposed to “salary”; this term is also more in line with IRC’s vision
Mahali Innovation Lab is a community-led and community-implemented co-working space that provides agency to those displaced by crisis who may be the best suited to solve problems in their communities, yet do not often have the chance to do so. Kaplan and her team at Mahali provide us with confidence for the future with their mission, helping communities-in-need one step at a time.
Melissa Cao is an MIT junior majoring in management