Christopher Fabian (born April 18, 1980) is a technologist who works for UNICEF. He founded technology and finance initiatives in both the public and private sector, including the creation in 2006, of UNICEF's Innovation Unit.
Fabian is an advocate of exploring new technology, and taking a "venture-style" approach to investments in the public sector. In this vein, he took part in the launch of the UNICEF’s Innovation Fund, the United Nations Innovation Network at the UN Chief Executives' Board, UNICEF's Cryptocurrency Fund, and the Digital Public Goods Alliance.
Fabian regularly holds talks and lectures on the impact of technology on sustainable development.
Before joining UNICEF, Fabian taught in Lebanon and founded companies in Africa and the Middle East, including a web portal in Tanzania.[1]
Work at UNICEF
Chris Fabian speaks about connectivity and data fairness and equity at the ITU's AI summit in Geneva.
He co-founded UNICEF's Office of Innovation in 2006, which focuses on connecting those with good ideas to those with the means to take them to scale.[2] From 2007-2017, Fabian has been Senior Advisor on Innovation to the Executive Director at UNICEF.
In its early days, the Office of Innovation developed open source tools for improving basic health and communication in low-infrastructure regions. It helped build the largest mobile health system in the world in Nigeria, which 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.[3] The Office of Innovation has also used real-time SMS to help stop the spread of Ebola,[4] smartphones to register children after a disaster, and tablet-based games to teach kids in Sudan.[5][6]
Fabian has advocated for technologists in the development space to incorporate The Principles for Digital Development[7] (first created by UNICEF and USAID). 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 Innovation Fund
In 2015 he led the launch of UNICEF’s Innovation Fund,[8] a pooled funding vehicle built to quickly assess, fund and scale companies, teams, and ideas that have been developed in new and emerging markets.[9][10]
In 2016, it added a UNICEF Ventures fund for small, early-stage investments.[10] 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,[11][12] 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.[13][14][15]
As of 2020, the Innovation Fund held USD $20 million and has made over 60 investments in open source technology companies in 40 countries.
Other ventures
In 2018, with Robert Opp of WFP, he created the United Nations Innovation Network at the UN Chief Executives' Board. This informal network spanned 1400 staff from all UN agencies and was 'decentralized' in its governance.[16][17]
In 2019, Fabian led UNICEF's launch of the first Cryptocurrency Fund in the United Nations. This Fund takes Ethereum or Bitcoin, holds it in its native form, and allows UNICEF to disperse it, as cryptocurrency, to open-source technology startups.[18] The same year, Fabian also launched GIGA [19] with Doreen Bogdan-Martin of ITU to finance connectivity for every school in the world. He and Sunita Grote were selected as one of WIRED Magazine's "WIRED25" for their work on building realtime maps of school connectivity, and creating financing partnerships based on aggregated connectivity demand.[20]
In 2019, he also led the development of the Digital Public Goods Alliance [21] - a platform built with the Government of Norway, Sierra Leone's DSTI (Department of Science, Technology, and Innovation) run by Minister David Sengeh, and India's iSpirit to identify and support open source software for public good.
Fabian believes that major global trends in technology and evolving power structures systematically and consistently affect poor people more negatively than wealthy ones [22] and speaks about how public sector money and investing should be used to create public value and public capital, rather than simply continue and extend systems of inequality.
Fabian has said that he believes technology is not the end-product of innovation, but a driver of new ways of thinking about development problems. He talks about open-source projects, learning from failure, and having solutions designed and built by local talent.[23]
Fabian was also an Executive Producer of the virtual-reality film Clouds Over Sidra,[24] 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.
Awards and Affiliations
Board Member, International Advisory Board, European Parliament Science and Technology Options Assessment Centre for AI
The United Nations Foundation is a charitable organization headquartered in Washington, DC, that supports the United Nations and its activities. It was established in 1998 with a $1billion gift to the United Nations by philanthropist Ted Turner, who believed the UN was crucial for addressing the world's problems. Originally primarily a grantmaker, the UN Foundation has evolved into a strategic partner to the UN, mobilizing support to advance the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and help the UN address issues such as climate change, global health, gender equality, human rights, data and technology, peace, and humanitarian responses. The UN Foundation's main work occurs through building public-private partnerships, communities, initiatives, campaigns, and alliances to broaden support for the UN and solve global problems. The UN Foundation has helped build awareness and advocate for action on, among others, antimicrobial resistance, regional action on climate change, local implementation of the SDGs, as well as global campaigns such as Nothing But Nets against malaria, the Measles & Rubella Initiative, the Clean Cooking Alliance, Girl Up, Shot@Life, and the Digital Impact Alliance, among others. In March 2020, the UN Foundation was also a key founder of the COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund on behalf of the World Health Organization (WHO), helping to raise over $200million USD within the first six weeks to support the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
China United Network Communications Group Co., Ltd. or China Unicom is a Chinese state-owned telecommunications operator. Started as a wireless paging and GSM mobile operator, it currently provides a range of services including mobile network, long-distance, local calling, data communication, Internet services, and IP telephony. China Unicom is the third-largest wireless carrier in China and the sixth largest mobile provider in the world as of 2022.
TIM S.p.A. is an Italian telecommunications company with headquarters in Rome, Milan, and Naples, which provides fixed telephony and DSL data services.
Strive Masiyiwa is a London-based Zimbabwean billionaire businessman and philanthropist. He is the founder and executive chairman of international technology groups Econet Global and Cassava Technologies.
Translators without Borders (TWB) is a non-profit organization set up to provide translation services for humanitarian non-profits. It was established in 2010 as a sister organization of Traducteurs Sans Frontières, founded in 1993 by Lori Thicke and Ros Smith-Thomas. As of 2012, it had about 1600 vetted volunteer translators. TWB's objective is to address language disparities that impede crucial humanitarian efforts. They aim to accomplish this by facilitating collaboration between non-profit humanitarian entities and a volunteer community of translators.
The Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) is a non-profit foundation based in Geneva, Switzerland. GAIN was developed at the UN 2002 Special Session of the General Assembly on Children. GAIN’s actions include improving the consumption of nutritious and safe foods for all. They are supported by over 30 donors and work closely with international organisations and United Nations agencies. Their activities include improving consumption of nutritious food globally. The organisation has a 20 year history of food system programmes: focusing on adolescent and child nutrition, food system research, fortification, small and medium enterprise assistance, biofortification of crops and reducing post-harvest losses.
Tuenti Technologies, S.L.U is a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) that operates with the Tuenti brand owned by Telefónica. It is a Spain-based tech company that focuses on providing a cloud-based services through its own application and its website to their customers.
UNICEF, originally called the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund in full, now officially United Nations Children's Fund, is an agency of the United Nations responsible for providing humanitarian and developmental aid to children worldwide. The organization is one of the most widely known and visible social welfare entities globally, operating in 192 countries and territories. UNICEF's activities include providing immunizations and disease prevention, administering treatment for children and mothers with HIV, enhancing childhood and maternal nutrition, improving sanitation, promoting education, and providing emergency relief in response to disasters.
RapidSMS is a web framework based on the Django web framework which extends the logic and capabilities of Django to communicate with SMS messages. Initial development was done by UNICEF's Innovation Unit for use in mobile data collection and polls. A side effect of the work was pygsm, a Python library for interacting with GSM modems, including cell phones which handle the Hayes command set. The software has been deployed in numerous countries, including Senegal, Mauritania, Uganda, Somalia, Zambia, Kenya, Nigeria, Malawi, and Ethiopia.
Boku, Inc. is a mobile payments company that allows businesses to collect online payments through both carrier billing and mobile wallets, and is headquartered in San Francisco, California. Boku utilizes mobile network operator (carrier) data to enhance the security and user experience for consumers online. Boku offers its customers more than 330+ mobile payment types in over 90 countries globally, offering a bank-grade payment system.
Sproxil is an American venture capital-backed for-profit company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts that provides a consumer product verification service to help consumers avoid purchasing counterfeit products. The service was the first Mobile Authentication Service (MAS) to launch in Nigeria.
Erica Kochi is a humanitarian and a technologist who worked in UNICEF's Innovation Unit with Christopher Fabian. In 2013, she was chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
Civic technology, or civic tech, enhances the relationship between the people and government with software for communications, decision-making, service delivery, and political process. It includes information and communications technology supporting government with software built by community-led teams of volunteers, nonprofits, consultants, and private companies as well as embedded tech teams working within government.
Stellar, or Stellar Lumens, is an open-source, decentralized protocol for digital currency to fiat money low-cost transfers which allows cross-border transactions between any pair of currencies. The Stellar protocol is supported by a Delaware nonprofit corporation, the Stellar Development Foundation, though this organization does not enjoy 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status with the IRS.
Organizations from around the world responded to the West African Ebola virus epidemic. In July 2014, the World Health Organization (WHO) convened an emergency meeting with health ministers from eleven countries and announced collaboration on a strategy to co-ordinate technical support to combat the epidemic. In August, they declared the outbreak an international public health emergency and published a roadmap to guide and coordinate the international response to the outbreak, aiming to stop ongoing Ebola transmission worldwide within 6–9 months. In September, the United Nations Security Council declared the Ebola virus outbreak in the West Africa subregion a "threat to international peace and security" and unanimously adopted a resolution urging UN member states to provide more resources to fight the outbreak; the WHO stated that the cost for combating the epidemic will be a minimum of $1 billion.
Gabo Arora is an American filmmaker, creative technologist and Founder/CEO of LIGHTSHED, a studio focusing on emerging technologies. He is a professor at Johns Hopkins University, where he is the Founding Director of the new Immersive Storytelling and Emerging Technology (ISET) program and lab. Formerly, he was a Senior Policy Advisor for Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and the UN's first Creative Director, with over 15 years of field experience. He has directed, produced and pioneered a series of virtual reality documentaries for the United Nations that have premiered at film festivals, featured at the World Economic Forum in Davos, screened at the White House, and have exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art's inaugural program on immersive storytelling.
U-Report is a social messaging tool and data collection system developed by UNICEF to improve citizen engagement, inform leaders, and foster positive change. The program sends SMS polls and alerts to its participants, collecting real-time responses, and subsequently publishes gathered data. Issues polled include health, education, gender, climate change, water, sanitation and hygiene, youth unemployment, HIV/AIDS, and disease outbreaks. The program currently has 28 million u-reporters in 95 countries.
MobileCoin is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency developed by MobileCoin Inc., which was founded in 2017 by Josh Goldbard and Shane Glynn.
Joy Marini is an American executive who is currently the philanthropic director of Johnson & Johnson's international philanthropy for maternal and infant health, violence against women, and gender inequality.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
