Giving Compass' Take:

• The Islamic Development Bank is creating a fund dedicated towards social innovation and entrepreneurship. This fund will promote more access to technology, innovation, and the sustainable development goals. 

• What are other ways that development organizations can increase technology and innovation in order to help developing nations?

• Read more about how other nations view the relationship between technology and social impact. 

The Islamic Development Bank annual meetings are underway this week in Tunisia, and one of the themes being discussed is social innovation.

Leading some of those discussions is Dr. Hayat Sindi, the chief scientific adviser to the president of the Islamic Development Bank.

“Social innovation helped me see a clear vision of the complex world,” she told the crowd at the annual meeting, as she discussed the importance to harnessing innovation and technology in the service of solving the world’s problems.

The bank recently launched Transform, a multimillion-dollar fund that will work to promote and nurture science, technology, and innovation. Alongside the new fund, it has also launched a digital platform, Engage, to accelerate economic and social progress in the developing world through science technology and innovation.

The Transform fund will look to fund outside the box initiatives focused on key SDGs including water, energy, education, food security, and health, and will be available to grantees in the 57 countries where the bank works, Sindi said.
The fund will offer several types of funding: Proof of concept funding to help support scientists and others to develop ideas and prototypes; scale funding to help young entrepreneurs grow and find partners or donors; commercialization capital to help scale; and funding to help build human capacity and human capital in innovation ecosystems.

Part of what the fund and the Islamic Development Bank more broadly will be working on is engaging governments and key decision-makers to create appropriate strategies and policies to foster innovation and entrepreneurship. Already, there are many requests from countries asking for help on creating the right policies, Sindi said.

Read the full article about the Islamic Development Bank fund by Adva Saldinger at Devex.