LEEP for Collaborative Impact was launched in 2020 as a community and platform to catalyze social innovation in Egypt. Initiated by RISE Egypt, it was founded on the belief that innovative solutions for sustainable development can inspire transformative positive change.

MAY 2024

 
 

Visioning forward for collective impact

RISE Egypt hosts a meetup for our partners at the RISE office to reconnect and enhance collective clarity on ways the LEEP Collaborative can further benefit each organization individually and the social innovation ecosystem holistically as part of RISE’s 2030 vision.

 

APRIL 2024

 

Launching the 2nd round of the RISE university internship program

We welcome our second cohort of data interns to the RISE team, furthering previous work done on building data pipelines for the  LEEP Innovation Map, analyzing development data gaps, synthesizing insights, and maximizing the impact of the map.

 

MAY 2023

 

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.

 

FEBRUARY 2023

 

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.

NOVEMBER 2022

 

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. 

 

JUNE 2022

 

LAUNCHING THE LEEP INNOVATION MAP

Building on LEEP’s mission of enhancing accessibility to a wealth of community-curated resources and fostering collective intelligence for community driven action, the digital innovation map of Egypt is launched. It’s an interactive map, showcasing innovations taking place on the ground with dynamic analytics on various key development indicators in Egypt.

 
 

FEBRUARY 2022

 
 

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.

 

JULY - DECEMBER 2021

 

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.

 

MAY 2021

THE STANFORD SOCIAL INNOVATION REVIEW RECOGNIzES LEEP

LEEP gets recognized as a leading initiative for collective impact globally. Dr Mona Mowafi presents at the Frontiers of Social Innovation Conference on citizen-led social innovation. Presenting alongside Sanjay Purohit, Chief Curator of Societal Platform in India, the talk reflected on how inclusive collaboration can lead to systems change.

 

JANUARY - JUNE 2021

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.

JULY - DECEMBER 2020

 
 

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.

 

FEBRUARY - JUNE 2020

 

LEEP Goes Online
with COVID-19

Within a few months, the coronavirus pandemic hits the globe and tests our community’s newly formed ties and our muscles for resiliency and adaptability. We re-imagine our programming and find new ways to establish a shared culture and deepen our bonds as a community as we adapt to this new reality.

 
 

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.

 

JANUARY 2020

 

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.

 

OCTOBER 2019

 

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.

 

JUNE - SEPTEMBER 2019

 

Outreach in
Governorates

Field visits and focus groups with social entrepreneurs in the governorates are conducted to validate the programming and architecture of LEEP and to test assumptions from the early design phase. Recognizing that needs outside of Cairo may be qualitatively different, insights from these innovators were crucial to the final design of LEEP.

LEEP Outreach Playlist

 

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.

 

FEBRUARY - MAY 2019

 
 

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.

 

JANUARY 2019

 

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.

OCTOBER 2018

 

 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.

 
 

MAY - JUNE 2018

 
 

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.

 

APRIL 2018

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.

 
 
 

DECEMBER 2017 - MARCH 2018

 

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.

 
 

NOVEMBER 2017

 

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?