Name Christopher Fabian | Known for RapidSMS | |
Born 1980 (age 34–35) New York, New York Occupation Technology designer, lecturer | ||
Simple innovation christopher fabian at tedxaaltouniversity
Christopher Fabian (born April 18, 1980) is a technologist who co-founded UNICEF's Innovation Unit with Erica Kochi in 2006. He currently runs UNICEF Ventures - and makes investments into open source technologies that can provide solutions to societal problems, particularly those facing children. Between 2007 and 2015 he held the role of Senior Advisor on Innovation to the Executive Director at UNICEF. Fabian spent a year (2010) as Senior Advisor on Innovation to the Executive Office of the Secretary-General. In 2015 he led the launch of UNICEF’s Innovation Fund, a pooled funding vehicle built to quickly assess, fund and scale companies, teams, and ideas that have been developed in new and emerging markets.
Contents
- Simple innovation christopher fabian at tedxaaltouniversity
- Christopher fabian social good summit 2014
- Personal life and early work
- Work at UNICEF
- UNICEF Innovation Fund and Ventures
- Lectures and philosophy
- Awards
- Publications
- References
Fabian is known for his work on tools for children and communities in low-infrastructure environments, including the Digital Drum, U-Report, and RapidSMS, which has evolved to RapidPro — a free, open source framework for rapidly building mobile services for scale.
In 2013, he and Kochi were on the Time 100 list of global influencers.
Christopher fabian social good summit 2014
Personal life and early work
Fabian studied philosophy at the American University in Cairo and at Trinity College in Dublin. He also holds a degree in Media Studies from the New School in New York, NY.
Before joining UNICEF, Fabian founded companies in Africa and the Middle East.
Work at UNICEF
Since 2007, Fabian has been Senior Advisor on Innovation to the Executive Director at UNICEF. He co-founded UNICEF's Office of Innovation, which focuses on connecting those with good ideas to those with the means to take them to scale. Since 2015, UNICEF convenes these networks of changemakers primarily through the Unit’s Innovation Fund and its Global Innovation Centre, which Fabian helped launch in 2015. The Global Innovation Centre, based in Nairobi, helps take successful ideas to scale and cultivates South-South innovation.
The Office of Innovation has developed open source tools for improving basic health and communication in low-infrastructure regions. It has helped build the largest mobile health system in the world in Nigeria, which has reported on more than 17M births by SMS. Other tools include U-Report, which enables over 3 million young people in 34 developing and developed countries to be connected to decision makers via SMS, and globally via Twitter. The Office of Innovation has also used real-time SMS to help stop the spread of Ebola, smartphones to register children after a disaster, and tablet-based games to teach kids in Sudan.
Fabian has advocated for technologists in the development space to incorporate UNICEF’s Innovation principles. These Principles, such as be open source, build with local technologists, and build for sustainability, are used widely in the international development community.
In 2011, Fabian advised on the creation of a framework of innovations labs linking WHO, UNDP, UNICEF as well as public and private-sector partners around in-country innovation. In 2013, Fabian helped launch the Child Friendly Technology Framework (CFT), 52 worksheets used for brainstorming and project planning when an idea for a project with a technology component is focused on children and adolescents. In 2015, Fabian designed the first Global Innovation Summit for Children, co-organised by UNICEF and the Ministry Foreign Affairs of Finland. UNICEF’s work on Information Poverty tries to use machine learning, data science, and technology to quantify and optimize a child’s access to information. In 2014, the Innovation Unit’s expanded the open-source system RapidPro, which the next year enabled sending and receiving over 150 million messages.
Fabian was also a producer on the award-winning virtual-reality film Clouds Over Sidra, created by Vrse.works. The film follows Sidra, a 12-year-old girl that has fled her home in Syria due to the ongoing crisis and found herself in Jordan’s Zaatari refugee camp. It provides a look into the day-to-day life that these refugees endure with narration from Sidra herself.
UNICEF Innovation Fund and Ventures
As of 2017, the Innovation Fund holds USD $11 million and has made over 30 investments in 26 countries, primarily in open source technology companies. In 2016, it added a UNICEF Ventures fund for small, early-stage investments. in 2016, Fabian has worked to build platforms that can allow for rapid development, testing, and deployment of new technologies and approaches to solving problems. Ventures work has included investment in “frontier technology” such as Drones, UAVs, data science and machine learning. Examples include the UNICEF Drone Corridor in Malawi, in 2016, and the "Magic Box" platform for working with large realtime datasets. The Magic Box platform allows companies like IBM, Google, and Telefonica to pool data so it can be used to make realtime decisions in emergencies.
Lectures and philosophy
Fabian believes that technology is not the end-product of innovation, but a driver of new ways of thinking about development problems. He talks about the importance of open-source projects, learning from failure, and having solutions designed and built by local talent.
He lectures about South-to-North and South-to-South innovation, and developed a "Design for UNICEF" course which he taught at New York University (co-taught with Clay Shirky) and Columbia University. He has also taught or lectured at the Art Center, Aalto University, Harvard University, IIT Delhi, Singularity University, and Tsinghua University.