Background and purpose of the assignment

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) is the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. WFP is the world’s largest humanitarian organisation, saving lives in emergencies and using food assistance to build a pathway to peace, stability and prosperity for people recovering from conflict, disasters, and the impact of climate change. The Innovation and Knowledge Management Division (INK) was set up in 2015 to manage change and promote innovation within the organisation. The team is working directly with WFP’s leadership to drive corporate priority projects and strengthen Knowledge Management across the organisation, sharing knowledge across geographic and technical areas.

Currently, WFP staff spend considerable time and effort searching for knowledge which can be dramatically reduced through technology. Automation to replace manual data entry, the use of artificial intelligence for text-mining to find answers – these are practices that have been embraced by the private sector, public sector and other UN agencies (e.g., UNDP uses AI for evaluation, NASA has a Lessons Learned bot). WFP needs to invest in innovations in knowledge management – beyond saving staff time, it will make the most recent and relevant lessons learned readily available to all WFP colleagues wherever they are in the world in support of WFP’s Strategic Plan objectives. Current approaches to the use of AI, automation, etc across WFP for Knowledge Management are ad hoc. Nutrition, OEV, RAM are all looking at different solutions to similar problems. INK (in alignment with TEC) is looking to develop a corporate approach to innovations in Knowledge Management.

In 2023, INK will pilot technological and processual innovations to improve the management of the organization’s high-value knowledge and analyze their impact and their scalability throughout the year. The goal is to identify those innovations that successfully improve the effectiveness and efficiency of WFP’s ways of work and the impact of its operations.

To prepare for these pilots, INK requires an extensive landscape analysis on innovations in Knowledge Management (AI, ML, Bots, Geo-Referencing, Process Automation, etc) both within and outside of WFP.

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What we delivered

Working closely with the Knowledge Management Lead and Head of the Innovation and Knowledge Management Division, our team of consultants delivered the following services:

• Identified and mapped out internal and external stakeholders to be included in the assessment. Developed the assessment approach and methodology.
• Developed an assessment questionnaire (online survey), conducted interviews, and focused group discussions (FGDs) with stakeholders within and outside WFP to identify, assess and document the internal KM landscape and innovative approaches and solutions within the wider public and private sector that are both on-going and planned. Organisations interviewed included UNOPS, ADB, EY, JFAD and NASA, among prominent individuals active in the area of KM.
• Highlighted initiatives related to social protection as part of the larger analysis.
• Evaluated and presented the assessment findings to WFP providing a set of recommendations for the way forward.
• Evaluated the feasibility and impact of piloting external initiatives and the scaling of internal and external innovative solutions in the short-term (6-12 months, medium (1-2 years), and longer term (2-4 years).
• Evaluated the required resources and efforts to pilot and or scale the initiatives.
• Defined KPIs to measure the impact and scalability of the identified initiatives that can be used throughout the project to determine success of pilots.