The HCDExchange Fellowship was conceived to drive cross learning between human-centred design professionals and organizations working within adolescent sexual and reproductive health. Fellows are selected through an open process and placed within leading design-led ASRH organizations in Sub-Saharan Africa for a period of six to nine months.
One of the core objectives of the HCDExchange’s learning agenda is to bridge the gap between design and ASRH by enhancing collaboration between designers and implementers. While HCD methods are increasingly used to design interventions across the social sector, the ASRH field has not yet widely integrated HCD into its practices. The vision for the HCDExchange fellowship is to spark knowledge exchange between the two sectors and develop a cohort of designers from the Global South who are uniquely positioned to design solutions for ASRH.
For this pilot year, the HCDExchange partnered with YLabs, Adolescents360, and Grassroot Soccer as partner organizations. Three outstanding designers were selected from a competitive pool of designers from across Africa.
They are:
Susan Towett, who joins Grassroot Soccer,
Isaac Kinyanjui, who joins Ylabs, and
David Mireri, who joins Adolescents360 in Kenya.
HCDExchange Director MaqC Eric Gitau highlighted the role of the HCDExchange Design Fellowship in catalyzing this knowledge exchange:
We are confident that these three highly skilled and motivated designers will bring dynamic energy to our implementing organizations and work with them to explore and test human-centred design approaches in their programming. We are equally confident that our fellows will come away from the experience with deep subject matter expertise in adolescent sexual health that will be invaluable to the broader field when combined with their HCD toolkit.”
The HCDExchange fellows have started work with their host organizations and will, over the course of the year, share their learning and reflections with the HCDExchange Community of Practice. We are thrilled to collaborate with them and our host organizations to advance learning at the intersection of HCD and ASRH.
Learn more about our fellows through their biographies below.
Fellow biographies
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