Innovation Library

DEPTHS is a five-step applied behavioural science process that integrates behavioural design, human-centred design, and systems thinking to tackle real-world challenges.

UNICEF’s AI Strategy 2025–2030: AI for Every Child, sets out the roadmap to ensure AI works in the best interests of children everywhere. The strategy highlights how AI can strengthen programme impact, improve operational readiness, and ensure children’s rights, voices and safety shape Al governance.

A UNU-INWEH report quantifying AI's environmental footprint across carbon, water and land, showing that AI is a material system with measurable environmental costs.

Learning today demands more than access to information. It requires opportunities to engage, practice, and apply knowledge in realistic contexts. Yet one key challenge remains: creating safe environments where learners can experiment, make decisions, and learn from experience—without real-world consequences. To address this gap, the Learning Innovation Programme (LIP) launched a series of pilot projects in 2025 focused on the design and use of AI Avatars.

UNICEF Innovation's Impact Brief 2026 reflects what's possible through a shared commitment to deliver innovation impact for and with children and young people.

Executive briefing developed with 20 UN entities on how AI, spatial intelligence and the AI-enabled citiverse are reshaping urban governance and public services.

The Readiness Assessment Methodology (RAM) includes a range of quantitative and qualitative questions designed to gather information about different dimensions related to a country’s AI ecosystem, including the legal and regulatory, social and cultural, economic, scientific and educational, and technological and infrastructural dimensions.

The report Empowering small-scale farmers through digital innovation: Insights from the Near East and North Africa region examines how digital technologies can support productivity, resilience and inclusion among small-scale farmers across the Near East and North Africa.

Harnessing AI to more effectively and efficiently enhance protection and solutions for forcibly displaced and stateless people and to deliver improved, data-driven responses across humanitarian contexts – people-centred and guided by principles of safety and accountability.

"Where do you start when preparing a country for the AI era?" This is a question more governments and investors are asking. The World Bank Group's new handbook, Accelerating Artificial Intelligence Investment in Emerging Markets, offers exactly that: a practical roadmap for building an AI ecosystem from the ground up that drives growth and jobs.

UN Blockchain Talks #8 explored whether stablecoins can support financial inclusion at the last mile, using a scenario-based discussion centered on Mariama, a fictional character representing real users outside formal banking systems. Moderated by Ali Al-Zuhairi of UNDP Alternative Finance Lab, the session brought together Dr. Margie Cheesman, Stephanie Joseph, and Freedom Pigott to discuss stablecoins, remittances, cash-out mechanisms, compliance, local infrastructure, data privacy, and the practical conditions needed for digital payments to work safely and reliably in remote contexts.

The UN 2.0 Digital and Data Solutions Expo is your chance to see practical digital and data solutions in action, hear directly from the teams behind them, and connect with colleagues working on similar challenges across the UN system.

The Core Principles for Meaningful Youth Participation in Intergovernmental Processes and Across the Work of the United Nations is a guidance document developed under Action 37(d) of the Pact for the Future, designed to move youth engagement in UN processes beyond tokenism toward genuine inclusion. Co-created through broad consultations involving Member States, UN entities, young people, and youth organizations, the publication offers non-binding principles aimed at making youth participation more meaningful, representative, inclusive, and safe across the full scope of UN work.

Innovation experts discussed accelerating transformative results via strategic processes, community-centered design, and effective stakeholder engagement.

The new Playbook on Digital Innovation for Supporting Families, developed by the Digital Expert Group convened by UNICEF and Van Leer Foundation, offers a practical roadmap to design more human-centered, inclusive, and scalable digital support systems. From trusted information and skill-building to community connection and access to services, it shows how digital innovation can better serve families everywhere.

UN Blockchain Talks #7 looks at where blockchain is proving useful across environmental sustainability in practical terms. The conversation moves through tokenized carbon credits, parametric climate insurance for smallholder farmers, digital systems for climate adaptation finance, renewable energy certificates, and tokenized nature assets, with a shared focus on trust, traceability, auditability, and real implementation challenges.

This note examines how agentic AI may affect payment systems, focusing on authorization, liquidity, settlement, compliance, and resilience. It highlights a key tension between probabilistic AI behavior and the deterministic requirements of payment infrastructures.

ITCILO's staff-co-created manifesto setting out five commitments for engaging emerging technologies in learning for social justice.

Explore impactful innovations across 45 UN Entities!

This UNU Rector AI Lecture Series episode shows how knowledge institutions and the UN advance responsible AI governance.

Driving progress and hope through innovation in humanitarian response

UNESCO and the Thomson Reuters Foundation are launching today a global report "Responsible AI in practice" based on information gathered from 3,000 companies about the Artificial Intelligence-related adoption and strategies. It finds that, as AI development and adoption accelerates rapidly in the private sector, nearly half of the companies (44%) reported having an AI strategy. One in ten companies is also publicly committed to adhering to an AI governance framework.

The UN 2.0 Data & Digital Solutions Expo invites participants to explore eight innovative UN and facilitates connections with practitioners while experiencing data-driven solutions in action.

The document presents a comprehensive perspective on public sector innovation as a driver of State transformation

This paper presents an operating model for integrating BeSci throughout the program cycle (diagnose, design, test, scale, monitor, and evaluate), supported by a methods toolkit and guidance for rapid learning using administrative and survey data (both digital and manual). It also outlines safeguards for responsible implementation, including a human rights-based approach, transparency and accountability, inclusion and accessibility by design, and evaluation standards proportionate to risk, scale, and potential harm.