Topics Covered:
Important International institutions, agencies and fora, their structure, mandate.
UNDP accelerator labs
What to study?
For Prelims and mains: features, need for and significance.
Context: UNDP launches Accelerator Lab in India, to work on pollution, water issues.
The laboratory that will be housed in the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) office here has partnered with Indian government”s Atal Innovation Mission to achieve the objectives.
What is it?
The Accelerator Lab is an innovative new initiative by the UNDP, Germany and Qatar, to find 21st century solutions to today”s complex new challenges.
Four key approaches sit at the core of the Labs’ work:
- Building on locally-sourced solutions, finding things that work and expanding on them.
- Rapid testing and iteration to implement what works and go beyond the obvious solutions.
- Combining the best understanding, ideas and expertise to generate collective knowledge.
- Accelerating progress by bringing expertise, creativity and collective intelligence to bear.
Need for:
- The impact of artificial intelligence on unemployment. The potential for disinformation to spread on social media. The need for policies that keep up with and drive innovation, while protecting human rights.
- Many of these challenges are growing exponentially. The speed, dynamics and complexity of today’s social, economic and environmental problems are fundamentally different from previous eras in history.
The Accelerator Labs are UNDP’s new way of working in development. They will work together with national and global partners to find radically new approaches that fit the complexity of current development challenges.
Sources: the Hindu.
