An exciting week it was for the IFA January 2021 cohort as we embarked on showcasing our solution for the hackathon problem.
A hackathon is an event where Individuals of various backgrounds get together for a period of time to collaborate on a project using all tools possible. My hackathon group had three members I, Gbolahan Kolawole, and Akinola Ifa. Based on personal experiences I was drawn to the educational problems in Nigeria so I chose to tackle this topic with fellow team members.
DESIGN THINKING
The process involved using the stages of design thinking to produce an impactful solution. Design thinking is an iterative process that tests your creativity and involves you thinking critically to solve problems. This iterative process can be divided into five stages; empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and the test stage. These processes are important to every solution or product cycle as this helps you to understand exactly what the users are looking for and will be attracted to, how best to deliver a solution to them and what they they should expect from your product or solution.
PITCH DAY
The pitch day was exciting and tensed, so many rereads and updates were going on in the morning of the day, strategies to implement. During the pitch we presented out solutions to the problems we were given and how we tend to implement them and integrate them into the society to our fellow trainees, facilitators and judges. Our pitch was more on how valuable our solution is to the poor population and how we intend to fund our business and model our strategies. How were we able to come up with these?
EMPATHIZE:
This stage allows you to define the end-user of your product using primary market research. It involves interviewing potential end and economic users in a bid to understand their problems and why it is a problem for them. In this stage we met with the stakeholders that is the parents, teachers, and potential individual donors and also the beneficiaries which is the kids and found out that many kids are willing to go to school and learn but hinderances like poverty or family responsibilities, early marriages and ignorance wouldn't allow them to. After this our two main focus were
How do we give kids good access to education and educational resources?
How can we help the kids and families in a way to alleviate hunger and poverty and remove family responsibilities from kids not forgetting barriers against the girl child?
So our problem statement went as thus:
Over 10 million school-age children (aged 6 - 12) do not have access to basic education in Nigeria, leaving them ill-prepared for productive adult lives and hindering national development.
Data from empathy interviews and reveals that poverty and shortage of good quality learning facilities are major barriers to learning for these kids.
DEFINE:
The next thing we had to do was define the problems we found out from the primary market research.
So we listed out the reasons why many kids aren't in school right now:
Poverty
Inability to fund education of kids
Family responsibilities
Early Marriages
Illiteracy/Ignorance of parents
Bad school infrastructures
Leading us to the two main focus discussed above, so we came up with some few scenarios:
Tunde wants to go to school but knows he has to help his family and hawk bananas to add a little extra to the table so they can have enough to eat and survive.
Aisha has been told since she was 5 that she's bethrothed to Mr Adamu and when she's 9 she'll be let go, she doesn't want to try to go to school again since her life already planned out by her parents.
Chima sees school as an extra waste of time, his parents says learning how to sell spare parts is the fastest and best way to good life, years to be spent in school should be spent in the market and he had to agree.
Isashi primary school a public school meant to teach kids is now half a forest and half a dustbin, from bad structure to open classrooms with no roofs, dilapidated buildings, no on is encouraged to learn from this and parents and kids prefer to rather do something else than allow kids waste hours in the sun or rain for almost nothing.
IDEATE
Seeing these problems on ground, how do we solve all or one of these problems defined. We came up with a lot of ideas and voted and discussed on the impact on each one of them. So after a lot of compromise we came up with one as which us a merge between the top three ideas we had.
A digital educational financing platform which provides sponsors with easy and free access to a carefully curated database of indigent children without access to basic education and public schools in dire need across Nigeria while sponsoring campaign against poverty and barriers against the girl child, and extending the helps to schools in need of resources like infrastructures and resources materials.
This solution involved partnering with edutech companies, bodies like UNICEF, UNESCO, Gates foundations and more for resources and Grant's.
PROTOTYPE
A Prototype is a representation of a product or an output for the sole aim of testing. We came up with a very nice wireframe for a prototype done with Balsamiq.
TEST
Of course we had to get feedback from stakeholders and iterate through the design thinking process again, with a short feedback from a few sponsors we saw that we were on our way to building a nice solution. Kudos to team Edsponsor!! :)
If you want to check our presentation slide out:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1WrjN1AlOJcbv8tRt0yOawiPdiscuH1GSC07jSl_MTFU/edit?usp=drivesd
REFLECTION
The process isn't finished yet, not even close we still have a lot to do from building a complete prototype, to contacting sponsors and applying for grants, testing the prototype more with a vast crowd of stakeholders across schools, teachers, parents and kids.