Purpose
Adolescents 360 (A360/PSI) aims to increase access to and demand for modern contraception for girls aged 15-19, through country-specific interventions developed using human-centered design alongside other disciplines. The project which started in 2016, is run in Ethiopia, Nigeria and Tanzania. In this webinar, A360, Itad and PSI shared and reflected on the findings from the phase one evaluation, undertaken by Itad.
Presenters
Meghan Cutherell
Senior Program Manager, Adolescents 360, PSI
Stefanie Wallach
Associate Partner, Itad
Heran Birhanu
Youth Leadership Hub Associate, HCDexchange & Designer, Smart Start
Ibrahim Kamaldeen
ASRH Advocate
Izzy Quilter
Human Development Senior Consultant, Itad
Setting the Scene
- The evaluation of Phase One is made up of three studies that were undertaken to understand how effective A360 has been and what changes are needed for future programming.
- The studies are the: Process evaluation. Impact evaluation and
Cross effectiveness studies - The webinar focused on the process evaluation which explored how the A360 program was designed and if it achieved what it set out to achieve. The process evaluation was theory based and started out looking at how the A360 Theory of Change played out in practice.
- As the project progressed, the team developed user journeys for each country to look at the experience of the users as they interacted with the solutions. The process evaluation therefore ended up looking at the user journeys rather than the original Theory of Change.
Key findings from the process evaluation
Insights
- The human-centered design process brought rigor and innovation to A360 providing space to try out new ideas and bring them to fruition, and creating a mechanism to involve young people in design. However, engaging a multi-disciplinary consortium led to challenges.
- A360’s use of adaptive implementation and meaningful youth engagement complemented the HCD process and added value by building on the skills and mindsets fostered through the design process to help country teams respond to variable performance, challenges and opportunities.
- A360’s strong performance is underpinned by several common success factors: life and vocational skills messaging flexible service delivery models working through public health facilities engaging government, trusted local stakeholders and husbands/parents.
Challenges of that came up in the process evaluation
- Since HCD is fast moving and dynamic, decisions are made very quickly with less documentation around decision-making than might be seen in a more traditional design approach. This created some challenges for the evaluation especially when the team wanted to go back and look at what happened during the design phase.
- The team was aware of the potential of research fatigue because community members participated in both the design and evaluation process. They therefore tried to overcome this by combining both research and evaluation activities as much as possible.
- The implementing team (PSI) did not always have the time to fully engage with evaluation findings so the evaluation team (Itad) revamped how it shared findings. It used slide decks with key insights and sense-making workshops with country teams to discuss findings
Developing prototypes to help share process evaluation findings with a young audience
- Prior to the webinar, the HCDExchange and Itad teams collaborated to answer the question “How might we share the process evaluation findings with a young/youth audience?”
- To find some answers, we held a prototyping workshop with eight young professionals who worked on the A360 project, from all three countries.
- Prototyping: Design thinking is actually more about doing, and as an aspect of design thinking, prototyping was selected to model this workshop because it allowed us to build our thoughts and ideas into tangible forms. With prototyping the end result is not a generation of ideas but a tangible form of that idea.
- We decided to use this approach rather than a focus group discussion or interview, to give us something tangible that we could then take and test. The youth participants broke out into two groups: young designers and young evaluators. Each was given a list of key findings from the evaluation and asked them to work towards a prototype for how we might share those findings with their respective audiences.
- During this webinar, workshop participants shared an overview of their approach and the two prototypes that they developed.
- Check out the prototypes and the workshop discussion flow here:
“Prototyping is an experimental process that gives room for those participating to explore real world solutions on the spot. This also feeds into building the creative confidence of designers and all those engaged in prototyping.” – Heran Birhanu
