United Nations Global Pulse is excited to announce that two high-impact projects have been chosen to receive the Scale Catalyst Grant from its recent Accelerator Programme cohort.
The selected solutions are the Accessible Digital Textbooks for All (ADT) Initiative from UNICEF and M-SCAN, Ultrasound for Safe Pregnancy from the UN Population Fund (UNFPA). These solutions have been chosen because they show the strongest and most compelling potential for scalability and demonstrate the UN transformation agenda in action — advancing a more agile, impactful and future-ready UN system. Over the coming months, these teams will work alongside UN Global Pulse to implement their scale strategies and accelerate the impact of their innovative projects.
“Every child deserves a textbook they can actually use and learn from. This grant will help us move from UNICEF-led projects to country-owned systems, using an open-source AI platform to make conversion of accessible textbooks faster and more affordable, so they can last and reach many more children.” – Julie de Barbeyrac, Innovation Manager, UNICEF
“As an innovation supported by UNFPA Uganda, M-SCAN is thrilled to be among the winners of the UN Global Pulse Accelerator. Born from a critical need to detect maternal risk factors early, our idea has evolved from a medical student concept into a life-saving reality. This $60,000 catalytic funding will allow M-SCAN to scale portable ultrasound services across refugee settlements in Uganda, bringing vital diagnostic imaging directly to thousands of vulnerable mothers in displaced communities and catching complications early. M-SCAN was born, nurtured, and continues to thrive through this shared vision with UNFPA as we work towards “Save a mother, Save a Life.” — Innocent Menyo, Co-founder & Director, M-SCAN Uganda
“At UNFPA, our core mandate is to ensure every pregnancy is wanted and every childbirth is safe, even in the most fragile and hard-to-reach humanitarian settings. Through our innovation partnership with M-SCAN, UNFPA is leveraging UN Global Pulse Accelerator funding to transform emergency response maternal care by delivering mobile ultrasound technology directly to refugee settlements. By bridging diagnostic gaps in fragile humanitarian settings, this youth-driven innovation empowers frontline health workers to detect maternal complications early and safeguard the lives of displaced women and girls.” — Daniel Alemu, Deputy Representative, UNFPA Uganda
The UN Global Pulse Accelerator Programme is a system-wide catalytic initiative for transformation across the United Nations, supporting innovation teams across UN entities and turning promising ideas into real-world impact at scale. In June 2026, nine UN-led innovation teams, chosen from a record-breaking 185 eligible applications, gathered in Helsinki to develop scaling strategies for innovative solutions that harness data, digital technologies and responsible AI to address some of the world’s most pressing challenges. A panel of external reviewers selected the two most compelling strategies for a USD 60,000 Scale Catalyst Grant, along with dedicated mentoring and technical backstopping to support their scaling journey.
As the United Nations marks a new era and continues on its journey of transformation, the imperative remains not simply to build more solutions, but to identify, strengthen and scale those that can deliver the greatest impact. The Accelerator Programme reflects this ambition. By supporting solutions that have demonstrated potential to address complex challenges with the Scale Catalyst Grant, the Accelerator Programme is helping move promising ideas beyond experimentation and towards wider adoption.
This is increasingly important amid constrained resources and growing demand across the UN system. The UN80 Initiative focuses on making better use of existing capacities, working across organizational boundaries and making proven solutions available across the system. Accelerating the most impactful solutions, therefore, means making strategic choices about where innovation can generate the greatest impact — strengthening capabilities, improving how the UN responds to emerging challenges, and enabling solutions to reach the people and communities they are designed to serve.
“The UN has no shortage of good ideas and promising innovations. The challenge is how we take the best of them beyond individual projects, so that they can make a real difference for more people. With resources stretched, we need to be smarter about building on what already works. That is what the UN Global Pulse Accelerator is about, and these two initiatives show the potential we want to help unlock. We are thrilled to support their innovation scaling journey and look forward to partnering with them along the way” – Tapio Vahtola, Head of Office, UN Global Pulse Europe.
Learn more about the two grantees and their inspiring solutions
UNICEF – Accessible Digital Textbooks for All (ADT) Initiative
Millions of children with disabilities continue to face systemic exclusion from education due to inaccessible materials, fragmented production systems, limited technical capacity, and weak integration of accessibility into curricula, procurement, and teacher training. At the same time, manual digitization processes remain slow, costly, and difficult to scale.
The Accessible Digital Textbooks (ADT) for All Initiative is a UNICEF- and government-led innovation transforming access to quality, equitable, and inclusive education for all across 18 countries and 5 regions: Latin America and the Caribbean, Eastern and Southern Africa, Europe and Central Asia, West and Central Africa, and South Asia, and is currently reaching 2 million primary school students and more than 175,000 teachers. It uses an open-source, AI-powered tool – which reduces conversion costs by about 20 times and production time by 90% – to convert static printed textbooks into interactive, accessible digital formats for children with disabilities. Features like text-to-speech, sign language video, and easy-read formats support inclusive learning.
UN Population Fund (UNFPA) – M-SCAN, Ultrasound for Safe Pregnancy
Refugee women often face limited access to essential diagnostic services, such as ultrasounds, and are less likely to receive antenatal care than women in host communities. This gap in care significantly increases the risk of pregnancy and birth-related complications, particularly for teenage mothers.
M-SCAN is a portable, affordable point-of-care ultrasound device, combined with UNFPA’s own GetIn geospatial-enabled app to bring pregnancy scanning and antenatal care to refugee women in hard-to-reach settings. Already reaching more than 20,000 pregnant women — including vulnerable teenage mothers aged 10–19 — across Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, and Namibia, as well as contributing to a 20% increase in antenatal care completion, this UNFPA-M-SCAN technology is expanding access to timely scans, strengthening antenatal care inclusion, and improving maternal health outcomes through early intervention.
Congratulations to these innovative UN teams for their exceptional work. UN Global Pulse is proud to support their progress as they work to scale for greater global impact.
If you’re interested in participating in the next cohort, you can sign up for UN Global Pulse’s newsletter or follow us on LinkedIn to be the first to hear about it.
You can also learn more about the UN Global Pulse Accelerator Programme and its most recent cohort.
The UN Global Pulse Accelerator Programme is generously funded by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland, reflecting Finland’s long-standing commitment to the United Nations and its leadership in advancing innovation for sustainable development. The Ministry for Foreign Affairs plays a key role in promoting the responsible use of innovation across UN operations, with a strong emphasis on people-centred design, data, digital tools and artificial intelligence.