Even under the most challenging restrictions, people find ways to engage in creative problem-solving. Evacuees, displaced persons, and others caught in crisis often have skills, talents, and aspirations that they draw upon to adapt to difficult circumstances. This oversight disregards the capabilities and adaptive resourcefulness that people and communities affected by conflict and disaster often demonstrate. Whether in the immediate aftermath of displacement or in long-term protracted situations, in both urban and rural areas, refugees frequently engage in innovation. Displaced across international borders, evacuees face new markets, a new regulatory environment, and new social and economic networks in their host countries. Being adaptive and creative is often necessary to meet basic needs, to develop income-generating activities, or to keep long-term aspirations alive.

MD Humanitarian Innovation Project was founded in 2015 based on the MD Consortium support and can also from the humanitarian associations and sources. MD create this mission to support the Evacuees in the Arabic countries.

Beginning with an initial focus on the role of innovation, technology, and the private sector in evacuee assistance, we have expanded the scope of our work to three main areas.

Our 3 project areas include: 1) evacuee economies; 2) bottom-up innovation 3) military-humanitarian innovation.

1) evacuee economies

we investigate what makes evacuees economic lives analytically distinctive and explain the factors that lead to variation in economic outcomes for evacuees.

2) bottom-up innovation

Three wide-ranging areas of research questions capture the work in this sub-project:

·       Direct innovation by affected communities

·       Innovation management within humanitarian organizations

·       Innovation on the edges - community & agency interaction

3) military-humanitarian innovation

The military become one of the largest ‘humanitarian’ actors.

Research and development jointly in the military leads to outputs that are increasingly used for humanitarian applications, and it is present in conflict zones and humanitarian spaces around the world.