Baku, 29 November: The first ever Accelerator Lab in Azerbaijan was launched today in the presence of numerous Government, civil society, private sector and international community representatives.

This Accelerator Lab will be joining the 60 labs set up in 78 countries around the world to test and scale new solutions to global challenges like climate change, poverty and soaring inequality.

These Labs, launched by UNDP, Germany and Qatar, will bring together grassroots ideas with new sources of real-time data and experimentation to meet the fast-changing realities of 21^st century development.

“We have just over 10 years to achieve all 17 Sustainable Development Goals by the year 2030 -- so speed is of the essence. We need a much deeper, faster and more ambitious response to unleash the social and economic transformation needed to achieve the Goals.  We need to fast track and put in place accelerated solutions. The Accelerator Labs are part of UNDP’s response to this urgent demand”, stated UNDP Resident Representative Alessandro Fracassetti in his opening remarks.

One of the big ideas behind the Accelerator Lab initiative is – as the name suggests – to speed up the testing and implementation of solutions. For while traditional monitoring and evaluation methods might take two years or more to ascertain whether a solution is working, Accelerator Labs can reduce this time to a matter of months or even weeks.

“We are proud to partner with UNDP in this global experiment. This network is an answer to new challenges of cooperation and a new model to help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, which require commitment from every nation and every individual,” H.E. Wofgang Manig, Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany to Azerbaijan stated.

The labs marry UNDP’s long-standing expertise in climate change, governance and poverty reduction with a new set of capabilities to tackle 21^st Century development challenges.

Globally, more than 150 data scientists, designers and ethnographers are joining the Labs team to help our mission to reimagine development services.

“The Accelerator Labs will help achieve the vision for the 2030 Agenda at an accelerated pace, by helping to pick up on emerging development trends and ideas that work faster and scale them up” H.E. Faisal bin Abdullah Al-Hanza, Ambassador of the State of Qatar to Azerbaijan stated.

In Azerbaijan, a local team of explorers, mappers and experimenters has already been brought on board to map out innovative solutions on the ground in areas such as smart cities, urban development, agrobiodiversity, transportation, information technology and healthcare.

The team will be working together closely with local people and innovators, and cooperating with the government, international partners and the private sector to map and highlight solutions that can help create jobs, develop new skills and improve the quality of life of people with disabilities in the country.

Media contact:

For media inquiries, please contact Dilara Umudova, Communications Officer for UNDP in Azerbaijan at dilara.umudova@undp.org.

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