When Delivery is at Risk, Choose Innovation: Development Projects that Bested COVID-19

At a time when the coronavirus forced humanity to take shelter, a handful of people had to step forward to save dozens of development projects and leave no beneficiaries to their fate. The different confinement measures limited and put on pause a good number of initiatives, which ceased to be a priority in a world that became “covidcentric”. In the third edition of the Superheroes of Development contest, the IDB wanted to pay tribute to the executing units that during 2020 continued to move forward despite the fact that the planet stopped, which demonstrated an important adaptive capacity to adjust priorities, redesign processes and even rethink the needs that they initially hoped to address. After evaluating 88 cases, six finalists from Ecuador, Suriname, Brazil and Paraguay were chosen, taking into account the size of the challenges they faced, the solutions they implemented to overcome them, and the lessons they learned along the way. Their stories are collected in this publication, with the purpose of exalting their work and sharing their experiences, so that the knowledge acquired by these executing units is available to others anywhere in Latin America and the Caribbean.