San Francisco California & London, UK, 28 Jan 2014
Mindjet, the leading innovation management and collaborative project management platform, and the Innovation Unit of the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), today announced their continuing partnership to solve a key challenge for the year ahead: overcoming language as a roadblock to quality education for refugees around the world.
Language barriers can pose a significant challenge for refugees around the world, creating obstacles when accessing information and services, engaging with host communities, accessing livelihoods opportunities - and - importantly for this challenge, obtaining an education. This is a strategic priority of UNHCR, as education can enhance protection by enabling displaced people to develop the skills, knowledge and tolerance necessary to support integration with host communities and to rebuild communities on return home.
This challenge was selected by UNHCR Innovation and the UNHCR Education Unit to find new and improved solutions for UNHCR, the leading agency providing refugees and others of concern with protection and humanitarian assistance worldwide.
This seven-week challenge - directed at the over 850 UNHCR staff members, partner organisations, and refugee communities that are participants on the site - is part of the wider UNHCR Ideas initiative that is hosted by UNHCR Innovation and powered by Mindjet's SpigitEngage platform. Those helping to solve the challenge will use the platform to share ideas and solutions to the question: "How can better opportunities be provided for refugees to learn and use a new language, both in school and their daily lives?" Experts from inside and outside UNHCR will then evaluate the top ideas and help participants clarify and strengthen their proposals. The winning idea will be piloted in 2014 in partnership with UNHCR Innovation and the UNHCR Education Unit.
"With many ongoing crises happening right now like in Syria and South Sudan, the need to overcome the short and long-term problems caused by language barriers in education is urgent. Millions of people have been displaced from their home countries because of conflicts and are struggling to maintain any form of normality," explains Olivier Delarue, UNHCR Innovation. "By having UNHCR Ideas powered by the Mindjet's SpigitEngage platform, we're able to better foster collaboration and harvest creativity from all UNHCR stakeholders across the globe to find innovative solutions to this challenge."
Mindjet's SpigitEngage is the innovation engine that drives growth, helping organisations unleash the creativity of its employees, partners and customers. Leveraging crowdsourcing, game mechanics and big data analytics, Mindjet works with the world's leading brands to spark ideas on a scale otherwise impossible, accelerating the rate of innovation.
"Developing innovative new products, services and solutions is of paramount importance to both private, public and humanitarian organisations this year as they struggle to meet various rapidly changing challenges, " said Andy Horn, RVP EMEA and International at Mindjet. "But developing and implementing truly innovative ideas which bring about positive change is easier said than done. With Mindjet SpigitEngage we help to amplify the knowledge of the crowd without the noise, select the best ideas and transform them into quantifiable impact. For us, there is no greater impact than the work UNHCR does to transform lives around the world."
For further information on the UNHCR Ideas, please visit the UNHCR Innovation Facebook page here and follow UNHCR Innovation on Twitter here.
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