Harnessing Creativity for Global Progress

What I’ve Learned From the Innovators Who Changed My Mind

By Sydney Hushie, Innovation Specialist, UNFPA East and Southern Africa Regional Office

Innovators from Uganda showcase their backpacks and solar-powered lights.

I grew up in Ghana believing that innovation happened elsewhere. In Silicon Valley, in gleaming labs in Europe or in cities where venture capital flowed freely and PhDs were handed out like business cards. It took coming to work across East and Southern Africa, a region that the world too often describes only through the lens of its challenges, to understand how completely wrong I was.

What I have witnessed here has quietly, permanently changed the way I see the world.

I think about a group of young women in Uganda, teenagers, really, who were given solar-powered lights through a programme that understood one basic truth: girls cannot study after dark if they have no light, and girls who cannot study do not get to choose their futures. Something so simple and yet the ripple effects on school attendance, on confidence, on the quiet expansion of what those girls believed was possible for themselves, were stunning. And this is done without complex science, no algorithm or blockchain. It was simple — just light, and the belief that these girls deserved it.

I think about the drones cutting across the Madagascar sky, delivering blood products and reproductive health supplies to clinics that roads and logistics chains have long forgotten. A mother in a rural health post should not die because a supply truck didn’t arrive. Together with creative thinkers and those who care about the state of our world, I refuse to accept that geography can stop us. Like water, we need to find ways, going through crevasses and spaces where no one dared before. This is creativity and innovation at its finest.

I also think about the HackLabs. Young people, many of them women crowded around screens and whiteboards, building innovative solutions to problems they themselves have lived. Lived is the keyword, not an abstract or a theory. The energy in those rooms is unlike anything I have ever experienced in a boardroom or a conference centre. It is the energy of people who know exactly what needs fixing and are done waiting for someone else to fix it. In Kenya, a young woman looked at the monthly reality of thousands of schoolgirls missing class because of something as preventable as lack of sanitary pads, and she built Ari The Pad ATM, a dispenser, installed right there in schools, that has now reached tens of thousands of students. She didn’t wait for a government tender or a research grant. She saw a problem, she got creative, and she acted.

Today is World Creativity and Innovation Day, a moment the United Nations set aside to remind us that innovation is not a product of proximity to power or privilege. It is a product of necessity, curiosity, and the stubborn human refusal to accept that things cannot be better. Across East and Southern Africa, I see that refusal every single day, and I celebrate it.

This year’s theme, Harnessing Creativity for Global Progress, is a call that resonates deeply across this region. This is a reminder that creativity and innovation, at both the individual and community level, have become the true wealth of nations in the 21st century. They hold the power to drive new momentum toward the Sustainable Development Goals, to create jobs, open doors, and lift communities out of poverty. But progress is only truly global when it includes everyone. And that means centering the creativity of women, girls, and young people who have too long been left out of the rooms where solutions are designed. In East and Southern Africa, those rooms are finally, unmistakably, being redesigned.

VR midwive trainings are one of the innovations supported by UNFPA ESARO.

At UNFPA, we have built our Innovation Strategy 2030 around a conviction that has become deeply personal to me: that the most transformative innovations are those designed “by, for, and with” women and young people. Not for them but with them.

This is what the UN Secretary-General means when he says innovation is sometimes not the most sophisticated technology, sometimes it is the simplest of things. All stemming from the minds of young coders who believe their ideas matter.

So on this World Creativity and Innovation Day, my call is simple. To the young woman in a HackLab in Gaborone who thinks her idea might be too small, it is not. To the community health worker who has been doing things differently for years but never wrote it down, please document it, we need to learn from you. To the policymakers and funders reading this, go to where the creativity already lives, and resource it.

I grew up believing innovation happened elsewhere. I was wrong. The future we are working toward, where every pregnancy is wanted, every birth is safe, and every young person’s potential is fully realised, is already being invented, right here, by people who have never needed permission to imagine something better.

For more on UNFPA’s Innovation, please visit https://www.unfpa.org/innovation.