LAUNCHING A NEW INTERNSHIP PROGRAM

We welcome our first cohort of data and graphic design interns to the RISE team. The internship program is centered around analyzing data gaps on the LEEP innovation map and bridging them, identifying data patterns, consolidating data pipelines, and improving communication through data storytelling.

LEVERAGING INNOVATION MAPPING

The RISE team presents at the Startups Without Borders Summit, facilitating a workshop on innovation mapping and its importance in scaling up the impact of social enterprises.

LEEP AT COP27 IN SHARM EL SHEIKH

RISE takes part in COP27, presenting the work done through LEEP for Collaborative Impact on mapping green innovations across Egypt. 

INTRODUCING THE LEEP INNOVATION CALENDAR

The innovation calendar is launched to offer a communal space for information exchange within the ecosystem, ranging from sector-specific content, to opportunities, grants and events.

Developing Community Data Resources

The second half of the year is dedicated to building visibility partnerships with key ecosystem players to streamline data pipelines feeding into and flowing out of the LEEP digital innovation map and the LEEP innovation calendar.

INTERNAL EVALUATION OF THE LEEP PILOT

We use this period to assess whether we will move forward with a multi-stage scale-up of LEEP.

Diaspora Outreach & Positioning for Growth

By leveraging the RISE Global Ambassadors Program as well as outreach partnerships, we are activating professionals inside and outside of Egypt to participate in the LEEP community and connect across boundaries through our online/offline platform. RISE Egypt is also investing in boosting its systems and internal resources to position LEEP for growth in 2021.

Monthly Meetups & Platform Development

Community members engage in monthly meetups designed to enable connection, collaboration and knowledge exchange. Development and validation of the mobile app and web-based platform continues.

LEEP community Launch and retreat

We launch a 1-year pilot with 37 start-ups from the education and environment sectors and begin testing the prototype of our online platform. This is the culmination of years of hard work, research and design. The pilot aims to grow a culture of collaboration and exchange amongst innovators from across Egypt.

Expanding our team

New team members join RISE Egypt to support the launch and pilot of LEEP for Collaborative Impact. HSBC joins as a corporate partner.

sharing best practices globally

Our team is invited to present our work developing LEEP for Collaborative Impact at the Digital Social Innovation (DSI) for European Union (EU) conference in Warsaw, Poland as well as a global data summit entitled ‘Codata: Towards Next-Generation Data Driven Science’ in Beijing, China.

From concept to community

Taking our concept to action and the wider community, we join a retreat for social innovators run by ElRehla (The Journey). It’s a chance for purpose-driven startups to connect, reflect and learn from one another. We fine-tuned our ideas and got ready for the road ahead.

building a platform

From ideation to creation, we start building the design of what will become the LEEP platform. Conceived as a space that supports human connection and collective intelligence for community-driven collective action, the platform creates accessibility to a wealth of community-curated resources and serves as a catalyst for fostering collaboration.

It all comes together

We share our vision of the LEEP for Collaborative Impact initiative with the world in this first sketch video. It explains what the platform will look, who it will benefit, and how it will tie together a community of innovators.

 LEEP ACCELERATES

Pilot funding is secured by Drosos Foundation to move forward with building and testing this new innovative model to support the Egyptian social innovation ecosystem through evidence and collaboration.

Global best practices: Digital Mapping

To take things to the next level, we head on a global field study to establish best practices in digitizing maps for social impact. LEEP Director (Dr. Mona Mowafi) and Co-Manager for Strategy & Digital Social Innovation Lead (Ms. Noran Abdou) meet with experts from MIT’s Civic Data Design Lab and Azavea on how to create effective maps to inform social policy, the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative on how to enable mapping in remote areas, and the United Nations Data 4 SDGs on alignment with the SDGs for global benchmarking.

Mapping the Egyptian Social Innovation (SI) ecosystem

Building on a popular mapping exercise from the Solutions Summit, we explore technical issues around mapping innovation for sustainable development locally. Organizations that have engaged in mapping diverse sectors in Egypt come together to validate the idea of mapping Egyptian SIs while layering on open data to enable more effective development research and market analysis.

Post summit: Validating ideas

Ideas such as digitizing a social innovation (DSI) map, centralizing a knowledge hub, and enabling visibility of resources that already exist in the ecosystem (to promote collaboration and avoid replication) are validated and integrated into a unified initiative. LEEP is born.

New Ideas for Collaboration

RISE launches its first Solutions Summit to explore how we can do more, how we can co-create ideas for collaborative impact. While this first solution summit’s focus on the education sector, time and space was set aside to leverage the collective intelligence of participants to brainstorm and co-design ideas for a cross-sector collaborative that could spin out of the Summit and serve as a foundation to enable the wider innovation ecosystem for years to come. This is how the idea for LEEP was conceived.

First class of RISE fellows graduates

RISE’s first flagship program was a 2-year fellowship designed to help 5 early-growth stage social enterprises scale their impact through data-driven approaches and access to global advisors and learning partners. After graduating this first class of fellows, we begin to think big about the future and how to scale the most effective components of our program. What if the evidence-based resources and global network leveraged for these five teams could reach hundreds or even thousands more?