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
10 May 2010
Posted by
Unknown
at
1:55 AM
1 comments
Tags communication, design, health, rwanda
06 January 2010
Learning #5: Poverty can't be solved by a campaign. Or a website.
Spending time working on a sustainable development project in Rwanda exposed me to all sorts of new ideas. As the "outsider," I realize I still have much to learn. I was grateful to be given a Kinyarwanda name and told that I was 50% Rwandan but these affirmations don't replace understanding the actual needs of a community. The thing I can't shake is how often we try to solve problems using ideas or technologies that we assume will work everywhere.
Quick back story: I made a website. For a group of individuals who did not have access to the Internet. The hope was that this tool would improve the sales of their products. But the analytics prove there is little activity on this site. Without a business plan, they have no means of owning their own outcomes either. So I've struggled with my contribution for the past year or so. And have come to realize that creating an isolated outcome is no longer an acceptable way to look at my design practice.
Lesson learned? Poverty can't be solved by a campaign. Or a website. We must be asking bigger questions about entire systems before acting on solutions.
Campaigns with slogans and accompanying websites bring awareness to issues. Twitter feeds support the ideas being spread to the masses. But at the end of the day, I think we need to ask, "Are the people who we're trying to help actually seeing some sort of benefit from all this?" Whenever designers get connected to a development project, I think we need to ask the right questions.
Maggie Black helped me understand that development is complex (in her book, The No-Nonsense Guide to International Development):
Even at the purely semantic level, the term 'development' is difficult to replace. If you dislike it and its derivatives - 'developing', 'developed' - and try to avoid using them, nothing else quite works. To understand that development is an artificial construct and has earned much discredit does not help get rid of it. The concept has become ingrained in economic language and philanthropic endeavor. In default of some better terminological alternative, we will probably go on using the one we have. It would be helpful, however, if it was more used with greater care, and not assumed to be invariably beneficent and politically clean.
From this experience, I would advise any designer to simply be aware. I won't create a list of dos and don'ts because I'm not the expert. But learn from those who have gone before you, as best you can. One person I've learned from (from a distance) is Jacqueline Novogratz (head of Acumen Fund). I devoured her book, The Blue Sweater and found her talks to offer a strong case for the type of posture and action we need take.
Novogratz shows, in ways both hilarious and heartbreaking, how traditional charity often fails, but how a new form of philanthropic investing called "patient capital" can help make people self-sufficient and can change millions of lives. More than just an autobiography or a how-to guide to addressing poverty, The Blue Sweater is a call to action that challenges us to grant dignity to the poor and to rethink our engagement with the world.
These are but two examples! The list is much longer. But preparing yourself to have your eyes on the system, rather than just the product, will go a long way in producing results that have a measurable impact. In reflecting on this and seeking to move forward, I'm grateful to have been approached about a project in Rwanda (still in very early discussions about this). If it actually comes together, it would enable my new learning to be applied to pursue valuable outcomes related to maternal health. The first order of business will be to pursue an understanding of the whole system before applying any finalized solutions.
One of twelve in this series
Posted by
Unknown
at
10:19 AM
0
comments
Tags design, health, technology