Meet the Contributors
Ana M. Grijalva is an economist, education specialist, and social innovator with 10 years of experience. She has a vast experience in program development, management, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation, but also in cutting-edge research and data analysis. She has expertise on key issues related to education, labor market, MSME productivity and governance. She has worked for different agencies of the United Nations (International Institute for Educational Planning and Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean) and for international organizations such as University of Oxford, Inter-American Development Bank, and World Bank. Also, she has experience in Ecuador´s public sector, and has worked for the academia in the United Kingdom and Ecuador. She is excited to collaborate to the change of the status quo through public and social innovation, data analysis, technology, and civic engagement.
As a sociologist, qualitative researcher and development practitioner, Jerson has worked as local development facilitator for grassroots community organizations and was a researcher and social policy analyst for the Social Policy Coordination Cabinet of the Dominican Republic. He has conducted ethnographic research on education, youth and teen pregnancy, precarious livelihoods and income generation policies, with a strong interest in small-scale entrepreneurs and the ways they understand the economic complexities of globalization. Jerson holds a bachelor’s in International Relations, a master’s in Local Development and International Cooperation, a master’s in Sociology and Education and is currently pursuing doctoral studies in Sociology.
Luong grew up around the world as a “third culture kid” and now sees himself as a global citizen. Having worked with the Innovation Partnership Programme between Finland and Vietnam, and contributed towards developing a thriving innovation ecosystem in Vietnam, Luong brings expertise in public-private partnerships. He is passionate about helping changemaker communities such as Knowmads Hanoi and Art of Hosting in creating space for meaningful conversations. Luong is a Swedish Institute alumnus and graduated in Master’s in strategic leadership toward Sustainability from Sweden. By combining his cross-cultural understanding, tech-savviness, and business sense, he hopes to facilitate organizations transformation toward greater sustainability, collaboration and creativity. In his spare time, you can find him learning and practicing his hobbies. He is always excited to meet new people and looks forward to listening and sharing good stories with them.
Innovation and digital business specialist. Sandy has worked in promoting and developing policies to strengthen MSMEs and before joining the lab was the coordinator of Digital Economy for the Ministry of Industry, Commerce and MSMEs. Sandy has coordinated the execution of cooperation projects to promote innovation with governments of Taiwan, Korea and Spain. Sandy holds a masters degree in Digital Business and Digital Marketing as well as a masters in Business Administration.
Caroline Kiarie-Kimondo is the Head of Exploration, Kenya Accelerator Lab. Caroline is a social impact strategist with a passion for framing and reframing positive social impact narratives. She has 15 years of experience in philanthropy, movement building, social innovation, and strategic communications. She's also skilled in leadership coaching, human-centered design thinking, decision architecture, agile project management, and adaptive leadership.
Nampaka is currently the Zambia Accelerator Lab Head of Experimentation and is a seasoned researcher within experience supporting the Zambian Innovation ecosystem with a bias on strengthening Research and development pathways for the growth of innovations by influencing government approach and methods towards responding aptly to grassroots innovations. Prior to joining UNDP, Nampaka worked at Innovations for Poverty Action. She has experience working in the development sector, promoting the use of rigorously generated evidence with partners, conducting policy driven research, and leveraging large administrative data systems to inform decision making processes and develop scaling pathways to move promising interventions from research to scale. Working in the Health, Education and Financial Inclusion sectors in Zambia, Nampaka also has experience in agricultural policy analysis and banking with a specific focus on fund management and marketing. As a successful applicant to the B360 internship at Credit Suisse, Nampaka worked in the Export Finance Department under Corporate and Specialty Lending as a Junior Portfolio Manager. She holds a Master of Arts Degree in Economics from the University of Zambia (UNZA) and a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Economics with Mathematics and Statistics from UNZA.
Christof has a background in private sector digital transformation consulting and development innovation and has been with the CDO since 2021. He has been supporting individual digital innovation projects and Digital X, and coordinates efforts to implement "Digital by Default": assuring digital is embedded in our business processes and programming life cycle.
Yrika Vanessa Maritz is the Head of Experimentation at the UNDP Accelerator Lab Namibia. She previously worked at the Office of the Prime Minister in various roles, including Learning and Development Officer and Deputy Director of the Efficiency and Charter Unit. She also served as the former Director of the Centre for Management and Leadership Development at the National School of Government, NIPAM. Yrika is a Clinical Psychologist by profession and holds a Master in Public Administration, as well as a PhD in Public and Development Management. She has been trained in various specialized learning and development models and schools in Tanzania, the UK, Germany, Sweden, Japan, and China. She is an accredited Management Consultant with the CIMC in the UK and registered with the Social Work and Psychology Council of Namibia.
Cristian Parra has a Ph.D. in Information and Communication Technologies from University of Trento, Italy, and an Informatics Engineering degree from the Polytechnic School of UNA. For the past 10 years, he has been working in social informatics R&D projects, using participatory design and human-centered design approaches to topics in community-based public health, social inclusion, civic technologies and citizen participation. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, where he led the projects of the Social Apps Lab (CITRIS). As consultant, he helped organizations like the World Bank, the IADB, the SSI of Berkeley, among others. Before joining AccLab, he was working as a Senior Researcher at the Catholic University of Asunción, where he led projects like TopaDengue, which combines community participation with technologies to fight the spread of the Aedes Aegypti through a bottom-up citizen science approach, within a controlled experiment. In 2018, with his team, he was the recipient of one of the Honorific Mentions of the National Prize for Science for some of these works. Cristhian has always had a passion for initiatives at intersections, bridging Computer and Social Sciences to inform research, development, and implementation of innovative socio-technical solutions for social or community challenges. This passion led him straight to this lab, where he sees a unique opportunity to contribute to the already great work that UNDP is doing in solving the big societal and development challenges of our century.
Experienced in Sustainable Development and Social Innovation. Worked repeated times in academic research, survey development and market insight. Elected Global Shaper by the World Economic Forum & Chevening Scholar for an MSc in Innovation and Entrepreneurship at University of Warwick.
I have spent most of my career creating order from ambiguity, whether it's charting my own vocational journey, supporting an African entrepreneurial leadership center launch, building the first pan-African network of tech hubs, or decoding early stage investing in Africa. In other words, I like to help great people build great things, ideally by marrying vision (dream+strategy) with implementation (getting stuff done). African tech entrepreneurship and innovation trends on all of my feeds, with a special emphasis on building enabling infrastructure (think hubs and accelerators) enhancing, the capacity of those enablers (especially early stage investors).
UN Advisor and Fellow - focusing on data, innovation, and digital tech in international development and government.
An inventive and dynamic software developer with experience designing state-of-the-art web, mobile, IoT, and cloud engineering solutions. Proficient in a variety of frameworks and programming languages, I specialise in developing scalable and resilient applications. Utilising cutting-edge technologies to address intricate challenges, propel digital revolutionization, and generate memorable user experiences constitutes my greatest enthusiasm. Continually seeking to improve, I excel in collaborative settings and am dedicated to remaining current with technological developments.
Mónica Rios has a Business Administration Degree, holds a Master’s Degree in Creation and Management of Innovative and Technology Based Companies (Barcelona, Spain) as part of the National Scholarship Program “BECAL” and a Diploma in Corporate Social Responsibility (Santiago, Chile). She worked with the private sector, NGOs and multilateral funds in subjects related to corporate social responsibility, sustainability, marketing, strategy and innovation. Before joining UNDP he designed and coordinated incubation and acceleration processes for MSMEs in the creative sector in Paraguay and social innovation projects through the IDB LAB. Her main motivation lies in lies in maximize innovative projects developed in Paraguay, which can inspire others to think big, as well as learn from other practices developed by others AccLabs worldwide.
Originally a development/environmental economist, now more of a quantitative social scientist. Anthropology, ethnography, network science. Interested in epistemology. Committed citizen. Runner. Ex-minor rockstar.