Prototypes for the “last billion”: a design jam on services for adolescent girls and young women in East Africa

[ UUID ] ef441da1-99b9-4deb-880c-6e814ec892c8

[ Session Name ] Prototypes for the “last billion”: a design jam on services for adolescent girls and young women in East Africa [ Primary Space ] Digital Inclusion [ Secondary Space ] Openness

[ Submitter's Name ] Justin Scherer [ Submitter's Affiliated Organisation ] Ushahidi [ Submitter's GitHub ] justinscherer

[ Other Facilitator 1's Name ] Monica Nthiga [ Other Facilitator 1's GitHub ] Nthiga

[ Other Facilitator 2's Name ] Angela Oduor Lungati [ Other Facilitator 2's GitHub ] aoduor

What will happen in your session?

We will lead a design jam where participants create low-fidelity prototypes in response to the unique context of “the last billion”—people with little or no access to stable, reliable internet or smartphones. After explaining quickly how design jams work, we’ll introduce the constraints for the participants’ designs with 2 personas that we’ve developed from field research and ongoing partnerships with small NGOs in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania who work on HIV/AIDS prevention for adolescent girls and young women. The designs will respond to the prompt: How might we enable adolescent girls and young women with little access to technology to raise their voices so that those responsible for serving them can better respond to their needs?

What is the goal or outcome of your session?

Participants will spend the session developing empathy and understanding for the unique constraints facing specific marginalized groups with little access to technology—folks whom most technology companies completely neglect. They’ll also get a taste of how the unique methods of human-centred design can create inclusive solutions to for groups with different levels of access to technology. The artefacts of the session will be sketches and low-fidelity prototypes.

Time needed

90 mins