This case study is part of our blog series on academic-practitioner collaborations in humanitarian settings. In this post, we feature the EssentialTech Centre at the Swiss Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne (EPFL), a research centre specialised in building collaborations between EPFL’s labs and humanitarian NGOs.
The role of the EssentialTech Centre at EPFL is to connect the university’s network of over 350 specialised labs with external partners, primarily non-profit organisations working in humanitarian action, peace promotion, and sustainable development. The Centre is also involved in the transfer of technologies developed within EPFL’s academic research environment into industrialised products, with a focus on developing sustainable business models.
A centre dedicated to matching academic expertise with humanitarian challenges
A unique feature of the EssentialTech Centre is the coordination role it plays within EPFL. The Centre’s strength is its ability to effectively identify and match leading academic expertise within EPFL with pressing challenges faced by humanitarian organisations. In this capacity, the Centre is involved in a number of relevant funding and match-making programmes including the Engineering for Humanitarian Action (EHA) initiative and Geneva Technical Hub (GTH).
As a result, the Center has accumulated extensive experience and expertise over the years in initiating and shaping collaborations between academics and practitioners. A core strength is having staff with experience working in both academic and humanitarian sectors who are able to understand the challenges and specific ways of working in both contexts. This makes it easier to identify potential collaboration pitfalls and foster a more supportive and conducive environment. One crucial aspect is building shared expectations between scientists and humanitarians, which requires early investment in discussions about resources, planning, and impact.
Dr Grégoire Castella, Head of the Humanitarian Division at the EssentialTech Centre“You should not underestimate the time needed to build a common vision and shared expectations between scientists and humanitarian practitioners.”
Creating complementary opportunities for academic-practitioner collaboration
The EssentialTech Centre is involved in a number of complementary funding and matchmaking programmes designed to address key blockers to effective collaboration between academics and humanitarians and the development of sustainable, scalable solutions.
An example is the Engineering for Humanitarian Action (EHA) initiative, which was launched in 2020 by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), ETH Zurich and EPFL/EssentialTech Centre. The goal of this initiative is to connect the research capabilities of the two Swiss universities with field partners to carry out humanitarian research and innovation projects.
The cornerstone activity of the EHA initiative is the Humanitarian Action Challenges (HAC) research grant. This grant is open to research groups at ETH Zurich and EPFL, and funds projects that develop technologies to address specific challenges in the humanitarian field. A prerequisite to receiving this funding is that applicants must be partnered with a humanitarian organisation; this is to ensure that there is alignment between the research topic and the identified humanitarian need. Since 2024, HAC grants have been open to humanitarian organisations in Switzerland and abroad, expanding beyond the ICRC. The projects typically last one to two years, with funding of around 100,000 to 300,000 CHF. While the majority of the funding is allocated to scientists, a smaller portion is reserved for humanitarian organisation staff to ensure that any emerging technical solutions are fit for humanitarian response.
Recognising that close collaboration between academic experts and practitioners is often needed beyond the initial development of solutions, the EHA initiative now also includes an implementation stream. This follow-on funding stream supports the further implementation of technologies developed within the two Swiss universities into real-world humanitarian contexts. The selection process for these projects is led by the ICRC to enable their full ownership of the technologies and solutions. Examples of implementation projects include a supply chain analytics tool developed by ETH Zurich researchers to optimise the ICRC’s medical supply chain and an open-source algorithm that helps the ICRC better map vulnerable populations.
Recognising that implementation is not a time- and project-bound process, the Humanitarian Action Fellowship (HAF) initiative was then further set up to create opportunities for ICRC staff to receive ongoing support and expertise from those involved in the initial development of emerging technologies. This initiative places PhD students, post-doctorants, scientific staff and assistants at EPFL or ETH Zurich in ICRC offices to support tech translation and implementation. The duration of each placement is between two to twelve months, where 70% of the academic’s salary is covered by the fellowship, while the remaining is funded by their research group. Positioning researchers within the ICRC’s humanitarian context also enables them to better identify potential research areas that could lend themselves to future HAC grant applications, building a feedback loop system that continuously shapes and refines research projects at the universities.
Leveraging academia’s more nuanced position on emerging technology
Academic institutes such as EssentialTech are able to offer a more nuanced perspective on technology, prioritising ethical considerations and accountability – a perspective that may not always be present in the corporate sector. This is a unique benefit of the academic sector which is especially important for humanitarian organisations working with vulnerable populations. Leveraging this advantage, the EssentialTech Centre also organises educational courses specifically aimed at humanitarian actors to build specialised technical skills. They offer a six week Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) to enable practitioners to make better decisions around digital technologies, covering topics like ethics, accountability, data protection, and cybersecurity. This builds on both the technological and pedagogical expertise of EPFL staff to develop actionable knowledge for humanitarian practitioners who are seeking to implement digital technologies in their work but may lack a strong understanding of practicalities and risks involved.
Using structured templates to build a shared vision and understanding
Fostering effective partnerships requires a clear articulation of both the humanitarian challenges that need addressing and what academics are able to offer. For initiatives like the Geneva Technical Hub (GTH), EssentialTech facilitates clear communication between humanitarians and academics by using structured templates to help them articulate their needs and contributions. The GTH is a UNHCR collaboration platform that connects challenges identified by UNHCR field officers with relevant academic expertise from Swiss universities, including EPFL. Field practitioners are required to fill-in standardised templates which help to define their needs clearly and ensure the right questions are addressed. EssentialTech then identifies suitable labs to research the problem, and organises initial meetings between the lab and the UNHCR. From these discussions, the research labs draft proposals for research projects with defined budgets that last a maximum of six months. This mechanism of using structured templates to build a shared understanding enables field practitioners to benefit from the technological expertise of academic researchers in an efficient and streamlined way. Examples of past projects include the development of web apps for practitioners in refugee camps.
Actively paying attention to the evolving needs of both academics and practitioners, as well as to the blockers hindering their collaboration has meant that EssentialTech has been able to gradually evolve and adapt their collaboration structures. In turn, this has meant that they are able to more effectively support a greater number of partnerships, as well as the development and implementation of more relevant and timely solutions to pressing humanitarian challenges.