Challenge:
Design and deliver a 6-day design thinking crash course to train a group of 15 young entrepreneurial leaders in Sapele, Nigeria, creating a cohort dedicated to supporting entrepreneurship and nation-building in Sub-Saharan Africa.
TRAIN a cohort of African DESIGNERS
In December of 2017 I co-led a six-day workshop in design thinking for Inspire Africa, an entrepreneurship institute in Sapele, Nigeria. My partner and I had a month from project proposal to departure to create a high-impact curriculum that we could deliver with minimal supplies while on the ground in Nigeria. Our audience comprised of 15 incredible community leaders and entrepreneurs from across Sub-Saharan Africa, aged 30 to 50, who would serve as trainers to thousands of young Africans through Inspire Africa. It was humbling and inspiring to work with them and teach a new way of problem solving.
We structured the workshop to take the trainers through a design journey to tackle youth unemployment in Sub-Saharan Africa. In doing so, they were exposed to the five core elements of design thinking: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test.
They started by mind-mapping youth unemployment to get an idea of where their project might go. They then went out into Sapele town and interviewed the youth, seeking stories and experiences. They returned and built personas based on the interviews, finding patterns and insights. They then made empathy maps, point-of-views, and how-might-we statements to define their problem and jumpstart their brainstorming of solutions. After brainstorming, they prototyped their ideas using storyboards and went back into Sapele town to receive feedback on their ideas.
Our goal was not to create experts in six days. Rather, we wanted to take them through the whole process then arm them with specific tools that they could take and use anywhere. After finishing their design challenge, we chose to train them on three high-impact exercises: mind maps, empathy maps, and storyboards.
We spent the final day of the workshop teaching the trainers how to introduce and explain the three exercises to anyone who might come to them for help during their time with Inspire Africa and beyond.
They left the workshop introduced to a new way of thinking and armed with the knowledge and skills to teach others these three specific tools.
