Our Impact

The existing business of global development and humanitarian aid is enabled by systems that remain largely foreign-led, top-down and techno-centric. WeRobotics aims to change these systems and how business is done by ensuring that social good projects are locally-led. Local expertise, knowledge, lived experience, insights and ownership are absolutely essential to the success and sustainability of social good projects. This is in contrast to foreign-led, top-down and techno-centric interventions that have been shown to fail time and time again, and exacerbate social injustice. Our Endgame, therefore, is to end the need for extractive, foreign-led and forever missions.

In 2018, we implemented the “Flying Labs Local Model” which enables existing local organizations to join the network. In 2020, we complemented the framework with the “Flying Labs Global Model” to allow for collective governance. Our most important overarching impact to date is the co-creation of the Flying Labs Network, an inclusive network of locally and independently-led knowledge hubs run by local experts with relevant local knowledge, insights, and lived experience. And to document and leverage the experiences made along our journey to build demand-driven and scalable models that are tried and tested to power future Inclusive Networks. Our shared success is demonstrated by the impact of Flying Labs and the Flying Labs Network in the context of robotics for social good and how we collectively are changing how business is done in this context.

Network Growth

The Flying Labs network grows organically. It is fully demand/need driven and sustained by existing local organisations.

Currently, the network counts 37 Flying Labs

Leadership

Local leaders across Latin America, Africa and Asia are independently leading the activities they choose to implement.

Currently the network brings together 272 local leaders.

Women make up 26% of the Flying Labs network, double the average industry benchmark of 13% (link to study).

Network & Ecosystem

We organise a wide variety of events to facilitate and support the Flying Labs network. And we co-create and facilitate a global ecosystem, bringing together technology and organisational partners, academia, research and donors.

The ecosystem currently counts 64 technology & organisational partners.

We have organised 159 activities / events for the network and ecosystem since 2019.

Opportunity Transfer

Co-creating and facilitating a vibrant, diverse and global ecosystem allows us to transfer international opportunities to Flying Labs.

WeRobotics has transferred a total of 443 opportunities to Flying Labs since 2019.

Value Transferred

We transferred 56% of our revenue directly to the Flying Labs network in 2022, up from 45% in 2021, 38% in 2020* and 23% in 2019*.

This puts us more than double above the aspirational 25% benchmark set by the Grand Bargain and Charter4Change. Note: only 2.1% of international humanitarian aid goes to local NGOs.

*Based on pre-audited financials

In addition to transferring 45% of our revenue, many of the 443 opportunities transferred to Flying Labs were turned into contracts directly with Flying Labs. We did this instead of taking on these contracts and the work ourselves. While we don’t track each contract in detail, we estimate that the value of such transferred contracts is estimated at over USD 500,000 since 2019.

Revenue Streams Transferred

USD

  • Grants include subgrants and microgrants.
  • Technology includes soft/hardware and hosting.
  • Training includes online and in-person trainings.

Impact of Flying Labs

WeRobotics co-creates and supports the Flying Labs network to enable more inclusive, locally-led, sustainable and impactful social good projects in Africa, Asia, Latin America & beyond.

Flying Labs create impact locally by strengthening local capacity, running and enabling locally-led social good projects, and by facilitating local ecosystems for drones, robotics and related data and AI solutions.

Discover the impact of Flying Labs in their local communities on the Impact page of the Flying Labs website.

Go to Flying Labs Impact page

Enabling environments ensure that Inclusive Networks  grow in expertise and impact. Our overarching impact lies in creating such an enabling environment for the Flying Labs Network in close collaboration with our strategic and global partners. This “Behind the Scenes work” means concentrating the majority of our efforts on supporting the Flying Labs Network with the necessary resources, tools, guidelines, knowledge and opportunities to become sustainable and thrive. This work is essential to shifting the power. 

Knowledge Resources

We create a wide variety of resources, from technical workflows to ethical guidelines to use cases and operational, financial and strategic tools. And we share them through a wide variety of formats, some restricted to Flying Labs and others with open access for anyone interested.

Research & Development

While the majority of projects and training activities are led by Flying Labs, we lead a number of projects and trainings for R&D purposes.

Competitions

We organize and run a variety of entrepreneurship competitions and technical challenges that allow to add missing resources to the enabling environment.

We have created 176 openly accessible resources since 2019.

Today the Flying Labs network has access to 122 exclusive and dedicated resources.

The resources we create and the projects, trainings and competitions we lead directly impact the following SDGs:

We aim to shift power at scale to change how business is done at the systems level, to change the narrative. We fully appreciate the complexity of such a journey as well as the fact that we are one of many actors involved. We are currently creating first impact in changing the narrative together with the Flying Labs Network. We are also taking first concrete steps towards enabling other international organizations to adopt and adapt our models so they can co-create their own Inclusive Networks. Thus creating opportunities and solutions for other organizations to take a far more locally-networked and demand-driven approach, proposing an alternative to top-down forever missions.

Storytelling

Sharing our successes, challenges, inspirations and motivations openly allows others to learn and hopefully get inspired to either shift power (international organisations) or reclaim leadership and power (local experts). Our main storytelling tool is our blog.

We have published 427 blogposts since 2019.

Experience Sharing

In addition to storytelling, we also publish learning reports and share our experience by contributing to working groups and publications created by other organisations. Sharing our most important learnings and pitfalls hopefully allows others to build on our experiences to create more impact for themselves.

We have contributed to 46 external resources and groups since 2019.

Models & Frameworks

The ultimate way of packing all our knowledge and experiences into a format that other organisation can then replicate is by creating models. Up to today, we have created and are openly sharing following models (click on the picto to access the models):

Flying Labs Local Model

Flying Labs Global Model

Inclusive Networks Model

We are updating our impact
numbers on a quarterly basis.
Last update: January 2023

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