What We Do
Across our different areas of work, our team is contributing to key advances in climate resilience, education, reducing violence in the home, tackling malnutrition, finding new ways for private sector to partner, ensuring humanitarian interventions are cost-effective, and more.
Changing how aid is delivered around the world
Breakthrough solutions are needed to match the urgency and gravity of the problems facing people affected by crisis.
That’s why the International Rescue Committee (IRC) created the Airbel Impact Lab, a research and innovation team that designs, tests and scales life-changing products and services to solve the challenges people face in crisis-affected communities. Whether it’s education, nutrition, climate resilience or women’s health, innovative finance or cost-effectiveness, we create solutions as big as the problems. Our vision is not only to increase the IRC's impact, but to change the way humanitarian assistance is delivered around the world.
Our Expertise
The Airbel Impact Lab supports the IRC by combining rigorous research with human-centered design principles and behavioral insights. This means combining design research with economics, psychology, and cognitive science to understand people’s needs, values, behaviors, and decision-making processes. We engage clients in every step of our process.
Cost-effectiveness is an integral part in designing solutions that are possible to bring to scale and adopted into multiple contexts. Airbel’s solutions are designed to maximize impact through cost-efficiency and scaling strategies. We’re also designing new approaches to raise finances for people living in crisis, and impactful ways to use funds before, during, and after displacement.
Investors are not capitalizing on the impact that their investments could have for people affected by humanitarian crises. Airbel has been designing ways to drive new sources of capital to the markets through cross sector partnerships that take into account actors different, but complementary, skill sets.
The best available evidence informs our strategic, programmatic and investment decision. We undertake rigorous studies, including randomized controlled trials, to build a full picture of people’s needs and challenges, and to test impact. Topics range from our Focus Areas to preventing Gender-Based Violence (GBV) to enhancing economic livelihood and resilience.
Unlocking the agency of asylum seekers and refugees to choose where they live within a country is possible through virtual resettlement options and innovations. This is an emerging area of practice for Airbel, building off of the success of digital platforms like 'Signpost.'
Path to Scale
We use this project lifecycle as we approach and co-create new ideas with local teams, and build partnerships with innovators and entrepreneurs to incubate and adapt their solutions.
To tackle problems, we construct multidisciplinary teams with design thinkers, behavioral scientists, researchers, technical experts and frontline humanitarian workers. We approach each challenge with an iterative, design-driven process, generating a wide range of ideas with client perspectives, drawing on technical experience, on-the-ground expertise of our in-country teams, and the latest evidence. We rapidly prototype potential solutions, testing them quickly with clients to see if they are viable before moving to piloting them in the field.
We rigorously evaluate all our projects to ensure they’re having the intended impacts in the most cost-effective ways. Throughout this process, we plan and test for the potential to scale solutions.