Challenge:

I work for an initiative seeking to help young learners in rural communities in East Africa catch  up with the current digital driven society. This we do by partnering with local communities to run  after-school digital literacy training programs. Our current challenge is to create support system  for the learners we seek to reach by diversifying the training to also train teachers and parents.  The project scope will be to establish the willingness and availability of parents and teachers to  take such training and how much they are willing to pay for the training. The big picture is to use  returns from adults training to support kids training which is offered free of charge.

Selection:

We selected learning launch tool to test ideas we had gathered from engaging with parents and  teachers and check the most viable approach to address the challenge. Given we had more  than one idea, learning launch tool would give us chances to pivot and build up through lessons  to the most feasible idea.

Application:

First, we asked for a meeting with parents and teachers association (PTA). During the meeting  we engaged with parents and teachers on “What is” situation in the community in terms of digital  divide among their children and the community in general. We shared with them data we had  collected, observations we made and statistics drawn from different sources. Then we asked  them to share with us “What if” ideas, what if everything was possible, what would they wish for  their kids? From the collected responses we developed a database of “What wows” ideas. We  identified a small diverse group comprising of students (boys and girls), teachers and parents,  community leaders (elected and opinion) leaders, experts and interested parties from our  network who we thought would be resourceful to help us come up with top 3 “wooooowest”  ideas. To engage them we planned for meetings, made calls, and established focus groups.  Next, we went out to test “What works” by experimenting the top three ideas on their minimum  viable product versions.

The first hypothesis test for “wow idea” was :- What if we could train parents with small business  how to use technology to improve their small businesses. Parents would have more time and  resources to support their kids learn technology. To verify this we interviewed 15 parents with  small businesses on challenges engages while trying to use technology in their business. Then  developed curriculum and training based on the challenges noted. We would measure the  number of parents who would be willing to sign up, attend and pay $30 for a 2 hours per day for

6 weeks training. We set the success rate / truth criteria to be right if 10 parents would graduate  from the program.

Insights

We noted we could have increased the quality of data by increasing the number of parents  participating in one cohort from 15 to 20.

Approach:

We noted we could have involved more local participation during the “What is” session. The  more the merrier and even if they don’t have more insights, participation drives ownership which  is key while working with rural communities.

