Dialogue Through Design

I met a designer today.

His name is Juma.

He got his training in Belgium as a graphic designer and now works primarily in the Rwanda Health Communications Centre. We both agreed that including some design training into the curriculum here would be beneficial. Apparently, there is a communications department at the National University that could be a good start. He figures he could learn something from me. I told him I imagined I could likely learn more from him.

Printing at Rwanda Health Communications Centre

My meeting with their key spokesperson, Nathan, yielded some interesting insights and information that will help me in planning for any design concepts in our project:

1) Community Health Workers (CHWs) are the people who will have the most impact in transmitting information (even someone from Kigali will be less likely to affect any type of behaviour change or product adoption)
2) The president has just initiated a program that will provide all CHW’s with mobile phones
3) There has yet to be a national campaign focused on nutrition (as other priorities take up the majority of their efforts)
4) People continue to be interested in the relationship between agriculture and nutrition (and how that actually gets measured and monitored)
5) T-shirts and umbrellas that have been used as incentives aren’t necessarily the most long lasting tools so research into what works best for health initiatives will be helpful
6) There are no extra copies of the CHW tools created on file since all of them are already in the field
7) Infant and young children nutrition tools (image below) are apparently developed but are still in the “soft copy” stage (which will help me understand how to work alongside what has already been developed)
I also asked Nathan about the types of visuals that have been successful in other campaigns. It was great to show him the various Sprinkles packaging concepts that have been developed and have him offer suggestions of which ones he felt would be adopted most quickly. Obviously, I’ll set out to design a variety of options to see which will be adopted or preferred.

For me, this was a key meeting and their department is keen to be in touch about the progress and process of our work as some of the information they want takes time to receive in order to message things in a timely manner. I love cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural collaboration. It isn’t a rapid process but offers relevant insight and potential.

Image developed by J&J Top Graphics Designers in Kigali, Rwanda