Summary

When I first joined Pact in 2016, there were no mechanisms in place for staff to research, experiment, and test newfound ideas. Pact’s response to this challenge was to create a mechanism for staff to access a support system to see these untested concepts mature. My role in realizing this strategy was to create a global innovation competition to source innovations from across the organization. After two years of managing a global innovation competition, with prize money being the only consolation, I noticed a gap in our approach to nurturing ideas. Staff needed more than just monetary incentives but actual hands-on support throughout the innovation growth cycle. I spent months researching successful innovation programs in the private sector and applied industry best practices to fit the development context. The result of my research and strategic thinking led to the formation of a virtual incubator program called Ignite.

Ignite quickly became Pact’s signature program for early-stage product or service ideas that showed potential to create transformational impact.  Staff from across the entire organization were invited to pitch their concepts for a spot in the six-month intensive program where they could receive training and mentorship from outside experts, access to monthly learning labs, and $25,000 in seed funding. At the end of the incubator, each team would produce three deliverables to demonstrate proof of concept: a pitch, a business plan, and a prototype.

Outcome

After three years of managing this internal incubator, Pact received 17 applications and incubated seven concepts, totaling $116,500 in seed funding. Teams generated a cumulative $60,000 in additional grant funding to support further pilot activities. Four of the teams that advanced to the pilot stage are still active, whereas three ideas have integrated into existing Pact portfolios. None of this success would be possible if it were not for the support of our 26 volunteers who served as mentors, advisors, and coaches.

In 2020, Pact decided to temporarily pause the next cohort of Ignite due to the uncertainty of COVID-19. Although there are no active Ignite cohorts, Pact was able to pivot its support for ideation and incubation and repurpose its resources to launch a global hackathon.

Role: Creator and Director

As visionary for the incubator my duties included:

• Research and design of the program

• Incubation curriculum design

• Establish innovation growth metrics

• Program management, including grants and stakeholder relations

• Recruitment and outreach

• Startup Coaching

Summary

In April 2017, Kozo Girls was launched, after the idea won Pact’s annual Innovation Competition for a seed grant of $10,000. As the winners of the competition, I was the team’s project manager for 12-months. The initiative was designed to enhance an existing Pact Zambia project working with adolescent girls and young women (AGYW), namely the USAID-funded DREAMS initiative (Determined, Resilient, Empowered, Aids-free, Mentored and Safe). Kozo Girls were recruited from among DREAMS graduates aged 20-24, and trained to make washable, reusable menstrual pads, to be sold as an income-generating activity.

By the end of 2017, Kozo Girls had sold over 700 pads, and had started to generate interest from customers requiring bulk orders. The Pact Zambia team saw that there was real potential to grow Kozo Girls into a successful social enterprise. After helping the team complete several months of market research, we tested several business models such as micro-franchising and other B2B models to determine the feasibility.

At the same time, Kozo Girls was accepted onto CARE’s Scale by Design (SxD) accelerator program, which culminated in a boot camp and pitching opportunities in Atlanta in February 2019, at which Kozo Girls won the People’s Choice Award.

The conclusion of the SxD accelerator also marked the end of Pact’s continued investment in the project. The decision came after three years of internal resources dedicated to the scaling of Kozo. This, however, did not slow down the demand for a reusable pad manufacturing company in Zambia. The original Kozo Girls now had three years of experience to build on and proceeded to make sales independently from Pact.

Outcome

In my personal capacity, I continued to mentor and coach the young women, helping them navigate the startup journey as first-time entrepreneurs. In search of their own equipment and space, we launched a crowdsource campaign for their new business. Within nine months, the we raised $3300 in additional capital to purchase sewing machines and invested in a new marketing strategy to debut the business as Lumuno Reusable Pads. Lumuno is now a registered company in Zambia and continues to fulfill orders of 100+ kits to customers such as orphanages, prisons, hospitals, and schools. We are currently negotiating a contract with Zambia’s largest teaching hospital and have create a purchasing mechanism for Zambian diaspora living in South Africa and the UK.

Role: Advisor

I have supported the Kozo Girls project since its inception in 2017. First as a project manager, and then as an advisor. For this case study, my responsibilities as a business advisor included:

• Lead the market research strategy and facilitate user-feedback collection

• Develop a sustainable financial model

• Champion fundraising and partnership efforts

• Craft the business plan and pitch for external investors

Summary

In September 2017, I co-led a two-week human-centered design exercise in Mooiplaas, an informal settlement located in the City of Tshwane outside of Pretoria, South Africa. As part of a wider prepositioning effort for an anticipated, USAID-funded South Africa Orphans and Vulnerable Children (OVC) proposal, the exercise aimed to generate user-validated ideas to contribute to the proposal’s design.

The design team conducted interviews and focus group discussions with young women (both attending and not attending school), as well as with local police officers, religious leaders, nurses, community health workers, teachers, and business owners. We also led a number of non-verbal activities to triangulate the various data points that had been collected via interviews, including a card sorting, community mapping, and home visits.

Following the qualitative data collection phase, I led the group through a mix of sense-making tools to determine the top insights from the discovery phase. In order to keep the experiences of the girls at the forefront of their minds, we created a user persona using an “empathy map” to encapsulate what was learned. Using the themes and the persona as a platform for ideation, each of the sub-teams developed concepts to address the issues identified with six prototypes emerging. All prototypes were tested with 26 of the original 29 girls interviewed, and a number of new insights were uncovered through their feedback.

Outcome

Pact South Africa worked directly with a non-profit organization in Tshwane under the Government Capacity Building and Support program to implement a number of recommendations that emerged, among those: focusing additional programming on girls ages 10-15; including programming for men, boys, and parents; addressing the lack of extracurricular activities for youth in conjunction with the existing HIV prevention curriculum; identifying, supporting, and leveraging positive, knowledgeable members of the community with whom girls feel comfortable confiding to be sources of information and support.

Although the proposal put forward by Pact was not ultimately accepted by USAID, the outputs from the HCD sprint were used as foundational data for developing digital interventions as recent as January 2021.

Role: Design Lead

As design lead and regional expert for this project, I was responsible for the following duties:

• Conduct secondary research to inform the design and structure of the field guide

• HCD facilitator for the discovery stage

• Lead the team through the ideation and design stage

• Design all digital prototypes

• Analyze results from exercise and lead the follow-up reporting and recommendations

Summary

In partnership with Trafigura Foundation, I served as a field researcher on an interdisciplinary design team to investigate health needs surrounding local mining communities in rural Myanmar.

The goal of the trip was three-fold:

1. Gain a deeper understanding of women’s health needs and perceptions around mining communities in Homalin, with a specific focus on raising awareness of mercury poisoning;

2. Prototype technologies which could decrease negative mining-related impacts; and

3. Develop knowledge on barriers, constraints and opportunities for possible project interventions.

Over eight days, we specifically focused on understanding health challenges of local women in mining communities. Through a series of in-depth interviews, targeted observations, and creative activities – we facilitated community-identified needs, perceptions, and potential interventions. In the final days of the assessment, prototypes and demonstrations were also used to gauge interest of residents in mercury reduction techniques.

In total, we conducted learning activities with 90+ community members across six stakeholder groups, including men, women, miners, community leaders, health providers, and local government.

Outcome

Prior to this research, Pact’s Mines to Markets team planned to implement a mercury-reduction intervention, believing it was low-hanging fruit and the greatest need among the community. Ultimately, the community had a significant amount of other needs, most of which were prioritized ahead of mercury poisoning.

In the end, the information gathered through our investigation resulted in great insight into community-specific health needs, including critical themes and ideas for programmatic interventions. This scoping trip saved a significant amount of time and resources, ultimately mitigating the risk of a failed mercury-reduction program, by identifying motivations for local communities to undertake healthy behaviors.

Role: Researcher

As a supporting member of the design team, my role as a researcher included the following responsibilities:

• Plan and execute ethnographic research with actors spread across the gold supply chain

• Apply ethnographic tools and analyze the information to obtain the insights and key discoveries

• Craft a long term strategic plan to reimagine the next phase of the program as it scales

Summary

In 2017, I was part of a design team in Cambodia that sought out to improve the use of a digital reporting tool called TRANSMIT, was a digital eGovernance platform for tracking and responding to citizen's issues in Cambodia. The goal of this design sprint was to determine the cause of the tool’s low user uptake despite receiving positive feedback.

Before the beginning of the design exercise, our team conducted a baseline survey to capture essential data. It included questions around end-users’ technology habits, as well as the pain points they faced when using TRANSMIT. The results of our research indicated a number of barriers including: limited internet connectivity, limited tech literacy and access to technology, low political will from the government, and low levels of confidence to engage with ‘authority’ from citizens.

After a dedicated ideation session using eight different brainstorm methods, we synthesized the ideas into themes, exploring more specific ideas around functionality and accessibility. These ideas then informed the development of three separate paper and digital prototypes. Each prototype varied in its functionality and user experience, but ultimately intended to offer the end-user a more simplified, accessible tool for reporting and tracking sector issues.

Our team traveled to Pursat, the community of our end-users, to test these prototypes. Knowing internet connectivity may be a problem, we also brought paper mock-ups and an overhead projector that displayed screenshots of each of the prototype wireframes made with Balsamiq and Mockingbot.

Some of the key findings from user testing, included:

• The access point was the biggest barrier for users. Many did not feel confident with the interface and had trouble switching the translation from English to Khmer.

• Usage was drastically affected based on ownership of technology, with citizen leaders the most likely to use TRANSMIT as they have access to issued tablets.

• Many users did not know their password to access the app which is an immediate and persistent barrier to usage.

These findings discredited the design team’s assumption that slow acceptance of technology was potentially due to the age of the end-user. Instead, research showed that the diffusion of technology is based not on behavior or age, but on performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social factors, and facilitating conditions.

Impact

Although the original goal of the HCD exercise was to explore changes to TRANSMIT to increase usage, the HCD exercise ultimately led the design team to recognize that the app was not going to work in its existing form. With this knowledge, the Cambodia team applied for funding from the Development Innovations ‘Second Chance Fund’ to support solutions born out of failed innovations.

With $15,000 in additional funding, TRANSMIT was reborn as ECET (Enabling Citizen Engagement through Technology) utilizing ‘chatbot’ technology fully integrated into the Facebook Messenger application. The Cambodia then conducted another round of pilot testing in Pursat municipality. Much was learned through this second pilot, but after funding ran out once again in 2018, the concept fizzled.

In 2019, the concept was reborn through the USAID-funded ‘WE Act’ project to engage young women entrepreneurs as leaders in their communities and society.

Role: UX Designer

As my first HCD field exercise with Pact, I played a supporting role in the planning of the research and discovery phase. This allowed me to focus on the responsibilities:

• Design of three digital wireframes for testing

• Lead prototyping with end-users

• Gather feedback and insights for further iterations

Summary

In 2018, Pact Zimbabwe’s USAID-funded Civic Engagement for Accountability in Zimbabwe (CEADZ) project brought together members of the local innovation ecosystem (hubs, entrepreneurs, activists), 30 local civil society organizations, and USAID staff to ideate around challenges to innovation in civil society and governance in Zimbabwe. As the innovation technical advisor to the program, I was responsible for designing activities that built ongoing capacity in women- and youth-led civil society organizations and, through the creation of an innovation fund, award six new partners $25,000 each to test new ideas.

The first activity was the two-day summit which served as a prerequisite for the second phase of the CEADZ Innovation Fund, leaving participants with the tools to propose concrete, feasible, and viable ideas that promote citizen advocacy. The format of the summit was delivered in three parts consisting of ecosystem building, capacity building, and skill building.

In May of 2019, I facilitated a second innovation training, explicitly for nine CEADZ Innovation Fund finalists. I tailored the methodology of the workshop based on an assessment of the finalists—originality and viability of solutions. Day one emphasized creativity, something that was noticeably lacking from the first round of Innovation Fund proposals. The second day covered principles from the Lean Startup methodology, a private-sector strategy that practices fast iteration and customer insights by creating lean learning loops called “build, measure, learn.”

The two-day refresher training was rooted in multi-sensory learning, where participants were engaged in a series of discussions, kinetic activity, and critical thinking exercises.  Additionally, teams practiced applying frameworks such as the Lean Model Canvas to their programs. In the end, each participant learned how to create impact indicators to precisely measure the value add of their interventions and a minimum viable product to test the validity of their innovation.

Outcome

The following data points highlight results from the closeout survey.

• 83% of local CSOs said the summits were the most beneficial part of the fund.

• As a result of the collaborative training, two CSOs revised their proposals in the second round to form a new partnership leveraging each other’s strengths.

• 30% of CSOs continued to engage with the local innovation ecosystem after the summits.

• One CSO replicated Pact’s innovation challenge model in their project, which USAID called a “creative bottom-up approach to working with youth.”

“The exposure from the two innovation summits was really great and the ideas and tools provided in the training stay with me and have proven consistently applicable beyond just the project. I am grateful for the process altogether, it was a stiff learning curve that has challenged our capabilities and we have learned some paramount lessons that we could have learned in no other way had it not been for the innovation fund.”- Namatai Kwekweza, We Lead CEO

“The fund helped me in commanding authority and respect in my community such that we are now more recognized in different meetings. The training we got from Pact also helped me in building confidence.”- Bulelani Simbarashe Musokeri, YODAT Coordinator

Role: Facilitator

As my first leadership role for a large-scale USG funded program, I was responsible for the following duties:

• Design and implement an innovation summit

• Facilitate a series of innovation workshops for 30+ organizations

• Train local staff on innovation granting mechanism

• Develop innovation metrics and benchmarks for grassroot governance programs

• Submit follow-up reporting to project manager