BODA BODA – A photo essay by Churchill

Plight of the Gifted in Africa by Simon Wariuoko

Africa spells a lot of names in the global history. Perhaps its hypothetical invisibility in prehistoric bed rest is what most transpired to the continent’s widely spread denotation: dark.

Surely as current times disclose, the Dark Continent has more light to its alleged darkness which could have been an infantry conclusive idiom to a people whose language they found to be way below the ‘primates’  league. 

Yes there is a lot of darkness in Africa, and yet in the shadows of darkness we see riches. We see a lot of colours in darkness. Reflections from objects, shadows, contours, all these are representative of just what to expect in darkness.

With over 200 million in youth population (world’s largest youth population in a continent), one can only imagine the synergy that is inclusive of this darkness. But if you thought that these 200 million are in ‘darkness’ then you are wrong. What these African people see is a future as bright as the sun rays that grace their mornings every day of the year.

There is this part that we however overwrite. We, every one of us, seems to turn a blind eye on what is and can be the turning point in Africa’s history. And yet the treasure lies right in our eyes and we do nothing about it. It is innovation at stake here.

With such initiatives as the Chandaria Business Innovation and Incubation Centre, some of us are beginning to understand what the gifted need. Considering there are countries in constant hunt for persons showing remarkable skills in intelligence, Kenya can only as a country accept what predicaments fate has for us if we continually and adamantly create barricades against our own gifted souls. Insecurity could be just the least of what is expected.

It is time our visual art, both literary and fine art spoke of us at the mountaintops, time we accepted ourselves for who we are rather than what history has always thought and brought us to be. The answer lies within ourselves. The Pyramids of Egypt and the Great Zimbabwe could have signed us but for all that is good Africa cannot continually dwell on her past glories.

Could we just for a minute or so pause our daily routine and for a moment think of what is there but is literally lacking in our overall design? Could the government look back to see what happened to an earlier proposal of having some schools in the country specifically for the gifted?

We might think that sieving our young with the ultimate test of examination is a big step that always leads us to having the best of them- the gifted. One doesn’t need to be a genius to notice the mighty overflow of wasted talent that goes back to the walls of our dilapidating towns. Small wonder our young, some of them probably gifted, are lost to the death pangs of illicit brews.

Enough said, none done. We are facing one of the most sophisticated ages of civilization in human history. Whether or not our art and literature as a continent, Africa, shall be a subject in this history rests on the sole factual reasoning and revolutionary ideas—products of upholding and constantly nurturing our own gifted minds.  

TEAM TENDO, THE TOTO GARI AND HUMAN-CENTERED DESIGN by Churchill 

I always had a hint as to what social innovation could mean even before I took a brief course on the same earlier on this year. And as I would discover during the inaugural East African Social Innovation Safari in April, I wasn’t so far from the meaning. What I was far from even guessing right is how the process unfolds and the challenges that come with attempting to innovate a solution to a challenge at a personal, group, communal, organizational or societal level. Five months down the line after the Safari, my problem solving methods have changed a lot and the way I also interact with people generally has transformed. I decided to adopt and use some insight I got from the ten day training and as a result I can confidently say that things are more interesting this way.

And so when I received an email from Peace and Collaborative Development Network two and a half months ago about a free online course on Human Centered Design facilitated by +ACUMEN and IDEO.ORG I didn’t hesitate to click on the discussion link to see how I could participate in it. It would turn out in the page that opened on the next tab on my browser that the course wouldn’t take a lot of time, had a few weekly assignments (ideal considering my already tight schedule), was to be done in teams and would be rewarded by a certificate of completion at the end of the course after the submission of all assignments. What mattered to me most was the fact that I am actually really passionate about change-making and getting insight on how I could do this through this course would really be something I’d not mind doing. As the course required, I had to form a team of not less than three people before we could get started on October 24^th. Wallace Odiwuor, Elizabeth Muthama, Susan Kalekye Muia and Maureen Okuto (all fourth year students) would be the four other members of Team Tendo as I decided to name it. Globally, the course had more than 16,000 participants and the last time I checked, the other teams in Kenya were just in Nairobi.

Team Tendo members, Left To Right : Churchill, Kalekye, Liz and Maureen.

Businesses, social entrepreneurs, and other innovators have used human-centered design for decades to create solutions for many different types of challenges. This course introduced us to the concepts of human-centered design to help make us more effective, innovative problem solvers.  According to the course organizers, the three major phases of the human-centered design process are Inspiration, Ideation, and Implementation.

In the Inspiration phase, you learn directly from the people you’re designing for as you immerse yourself in their lives and come to deeply understand their needs and aspirations. The Inspiration phase is about learning on the fly, opening yourself up to creative possibilities, and trusting that as long as you remain grounded in desires of the people you’re designing for, your ideas will evolve into the right solution. As part of the course, during the inspiration phase we had to choose a design challenge from a list of three challenges that had been identified by the course facilitators. To choose a design challenge we had to collect our thoughts around one challenge that we chose through voting then followed that with a review of what we already knew, defined what we didn’t know then reviewed the constraints or barriers to taking on that challenge. That was followed by planning our research method where we defined our audience with the challenge we chose, planned the logistics of going to the field, came up with recruitment tools and established how to create a trusted atmosphere with those we were designing for and those we had to talk to while designing.

We had to learn from experts, immerse ourselves in the context of the problem we were designing a solution for and selected an analogous inspiration that could help us understand our challenge more. At this point we were introduced to a case study, VROOM, a human-centered take on early childhood development. In this case, The IDEO.org team undertook a highly immersive inspiration phase, visiting low-income communities in California, New York, and Pennsylvania to conduct interviews with parents and to observe existing programs aimed at improving child development outcomes. The team learned that many of the parents they met had had very tough upbringings. These parents didn’t feel fully equipped to engage with their children, because their own parents didn’t engage with them. At the end of this phase we settled on challenge three where we had To Design A Solution That Would Help Parents In Low-Income Communities Ensure Children Thrive In Their First Five Years. We interacted with the community around Mabungo and Nyawita areas as part of our immersion process and also talked to child care experts around the university. This challenge had been selected as one of the #zerotofivechallenges by AMPLIFY that was also collaborating with +ACUMEN in this course. This meant that if our idea was to be shortlisted upon completion of the course, we could continue participating on the AMPLIFY platform to refine our idea based on the Refinement Phase. If our idea gets all the way to the final stage, we could be in the running for funding and design support from IDEO.org!

Wallace, Liz and Kalekye integrating findings after field research

The Ideation phase transformed our research into meaningful and actionable insights that became the foundation of our design. We begun by making sense of what we learned from our design research. These themes and insights helped us define opportunities for design that were differentiated and generative. We then brainstormed lots of new ideas and set out building prototypes to test these concepts. Continuing to test and iterate on our ideas helped shape a more innovative, effective solution. In the design process, searching for meaning in the nitty gritties you find in the field is really critical to getting down to the beat that could give you the rhythm to the solution you desire. We listened to each other and adopted a YES AND approach in place of a more common YES BUT approach that usually excludes most people ideas.  While brainstorming we had really wild ideas and encouraged each of us to generate as many as possible. We also deferred judgment, went for quantity and illustrated ideas visually. After selecting the most promising idea, we determined what to prototype and designed for them. Upon getting feedback after prototyping and prioritizing it, we had to integrate them in our next iteration. At this advanced stage, we studied Moneythink Mobile, an innovation where human-centered designers were designing digital tools to build financial literacy. Another case study was where IDEO.org partnered with Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor to design a new pit latrine emptying business in Zambia. The team designed a service called Pump Away.

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We had a mock pitching session and as you see Liz was strict!

The Implementation phase is about understanding how to bring your solution to life, and to market in the real world. In the end, you’ll know that your solution will be a success because you’ve kept the very people you’re looking to serve at the heart of the process. In this case, we learned the tools necessary to consider how we could build partnerships, refine our business (or non-profit) model, pilot our idea, and eventually get our idea out there — all these is if we were to truly

implement our idea, which is dependent on how our idea will be rated by the course facilitators.

Well if you would like to get the final presentation of our idea, The TOTO GARI, kindly mail us at bamumaseno@gmail.com and we will be very glad to mail you the power point presentation. Alternatively, comment below with your e-mail address and we will mail it to you. We are sharing it on this platform to get your feedback on places you think we might have not explored well or ignored totally. I decided to share it as the last part of this article after having taken you through the design process. Feel free to leave your questions, insight and views in the comments section. Also, wish us luck!

The Toto Gari will be something close to this

#MYDRESSMYCHOICE

When we said we were taking a good number of photos of ladies in dresses to show our solidarity with the #MyDressMyChoice movement some people called it a bluff. Well we weren’t, here you go!