Single Session - Scaling solutions for humanitarian impact: The Humanitarian and Resilience Investing (HRI) approach - English

With over 1 billion people living in fragile settings worldwide and 274 million people requiring humanitarian assistance this year, the need to find new ways to increase resilience and drive sustainable humanitarian impact has never been greater. Humanitarian and resilience investing (HRI) is capital invested in ways that measurably benefit communities and strengthen economies in humanitarian and fragile contexts, while creating a financial return. It is a new approach coined by the HRI Initiative to complement established humanitarian action or interventions with market-driven solutions that provide long-term and sustainable impact on vulnerable people and economies (i.e. HRI opportunities). The initiative is launching a programme in early 2023 that will cultivate a pipeline of financially sustainable HRI opportunities ready to scale through return-seeking capital. From 6 October to 17 November, the initiative will run a challenge on the World Economic Forum’s innovation platform, UpLink, to select the first cohort of this programme. The challenge is supported by British International Investment (BII), Deloitte, Devex, the European Commission, IKEA Foundation, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Vital Capital, the World Bank Group and the World Food Programme (WFP). This session brings together leaders of key organizations active in HRI to reflect on the potential of HRI as a new approach to achieve sustainable humanitarian impact, hear from pioneers in HRI, and announce the launch of a challenge on UpLink. For more information on the HRI Initiative, please visit: https://initiatives.weforum.org/humanitarian-and-resilience-investing-initiative/home.