General FAQs

What is inaglobe?

Inaglobe is a charity* that seeks to provide holistic and collaborative humanitarian innovation in higher education institutions. We work closely with humanitarian partners to identify challenges on the ground, and then connect them with academics and STEM students who work on solving these. We enable a relationship between both players and involve humanitarian partners across the whole innovation cycle. We follow a sustainable, human-centred and systemic approach to the work that we do. There are two dimensions to our work: the educational experience and the technological innovation we enable.

* application ongoing

Who is behind inaglobe?

Inaglobe, originally InAGlobe Education, was founded in the summer of 2017 by Jaime, Alberto and Xavi, at the time students at Imperial College London. Since, many people have gotten involved as volunteers with varying degrees of involvement. Currently we are a team of 8 with backgrounds in Engineering, History, Law, Anthropology and many more domains! In addition, there are people that provide us advice and counsel on a regular basis that are highly experienced and accomplished professionals and academics. We have built a very diverse and hands-on team, willing to strive for our North Star of equipping future professionals with the tools to innovate at a global scale, priming access and inclusion, as well as sustainability.

How do you ensure success?

We are constantly learning and redefining the way we do things. We rely on brutal transparency, on ever-present humility and a very specific methodology that ensures stakeholders are represented and have a voice, and that technological challenges are approached with a system’s approach. Our work is only starting, and so we keep a close contact with all the stakeholders involved on the platform and in our offerings. We seek alignment of objectives between the stakeholders such that real impact can be achieved, and representation of those poised to benefit is guaranteed and their context designed for.

Where does inaglobe’s responsibility end?

Inaglobe is an enabler, we take care of establishing healthy and productive relationships, and giving the tools for participating successfully on the platform. We support humanitarian partners in defining the project opportunities using human-centred design and systems thinking approaches, but ultimately the key stakeholders need to approve a project before we can share it on our platform and with our academic network. We aid with outreach in placing the projects into the academic curriculum. 

We are working to expand our operations, and we are trialing implementation support, whether it is from advisory services, financial support or access to human capital. These aren’t yet part of our core offering because we see ourselves as brokers rather than owners: our stakeholders are the owners. We do, however, understand we have a responsibility to ensure the success of the projects and our stakeholders, as it will reflect the success of the platform and the ecosystem we are building.

How do you manage situations where partnerships end without notice?

No one is obliged to remain within the platform if it is at the expense of their primary objective as a humanitarian or academic institution; however, we do promote a culture of responsibility and ownership, such that remaining in partnership will almost always seem more beneficial. Now in the case when a partnership ends and a project is left orphaned, we will do our best efforts to find an alternative owner to the project in the same context from where it was sourced. There are occasions where projects replicate across geographies and stakeholders, and so sometimes we find having multiple potential owners of a project.

How can I get involved?

Firstly: Contact us via our contact form! Secondly, it really depends on what you want to do and what your expertise is! We welcome people from all walks of life to be volunteers and advisors, and we believe that by bringing diversity of experiences and perspectives we enrich the value that we can provide. 

If you are a humanitarian organisation that wants to contribute to our cause through helping us document projects and develop an educational vision around humanitarian innovation, do reach out to us!

Furthermore, we are soon launching a donation section that allows you to contribute to covering our costs and become more effective. We are in the process of building a series of tools to give absolute transparency to where the money goes, but also to empower the donor to choose which aspects of inaglobe and what projects to finance. We will announce this when it’s ready!