Libby McDonald, Sher Vogel, Anne Thibault, Daniela Teran, Arya Yadama, Kim Trageser, Kasia Jakimowicz, Nathalia Mendoza, Alejandra Medina
2020 to 2022
Theory of Change
"If women miners in Colombia have the support and opportunity to develop collective action through personal narrative (enhancing voice), co-design (enhancing agency), and advocacy skills (enhancing opportunity), then they can organize themselves into associations that identify common challenges; campaign for social, economic, and environmental well-being; and implement an advocacy roadmap that improves natural resource management and addresses GBV in their communities at the household, community, and national levels." - ARM + D-Lab
Designing a three-phased movement and creative capacity-building workshop to address gender-based violence (GBV) in the artisanal and small-scale mining sector (ASM) in Colombia as part of an ongoing project conducted by MIT D-Lab and the Alliance for Responsible Mining (ARM).
By combining different methodologies, training delivered by this program will provide miner women in four targeted communities with a safe space to tell individual and common stories related to their day-to-day reality of GBV, whilst also providing a framework for them to identify the particular GBV challenges they face and build appropriate solutions to those seemingly insurmountable challenges.
Ultimately, this process will allow women to see themselves as capable of devising a way forward for themselves, working effectively together to do so, sparking regional solidarity and self-determination.
I am a Design Research Consultant and systems practice expert for this project.
Main areas of responsibility:
- Manage and mentor 3 volunteer students.
- Conduct secondary research.
- Instructional design for system thinking and systems practice workshop activities.
- Contextualize frameworks and methodologies.
- Storyboard and prototype the user experience.
- Storytelling, Branding, Digital and Printed Material Illustration.
My Role
Research + Discovery
We started by conducting secondary research and writing a literature review on topics ranging from Gender-Based Violence to the gold value chain in Colombia and the world.
Part of the team performed a gender analysis on the context and targeted communities. The partner organization on-site, the Alliance for Responsible Mining, performed and presented a CRAFT risk analysis.
Key Insights
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💡 The literature revealed a pattern of environmental hazards and gender-specific health risks for women in mining areas.
💡 Given informality and limited income prospects, women in mining commonly engage in other activities to increase income, i.e., informal food businesses or seasonal agriculture work and transactional sex.
💡 We will face the challenge of cultural relativism. The participants may not conceptualize violence in the same way that we do.
💡 Workshops will have to be sensitive to the potentially complex and traumatic nature of topics we plan to address.
💡 Women are at a heightened risk of violence, murder, or disappearance when they claim autonomy or leadership. We need to explore how to build collective leadership.
The Methodologies
Taking advantage of our team's multidisciplinary background and our varied expertise in systems mapping, pedagogical approaches, and design, we were able to make use of several different methodological approaches to accomplish the learning objectives in the development of our workshops.
Systems Practice
Systems Practice is a method for understanding systems by examining the interactions between the elements that compose their entirety. To understand the complexity of what happens around us, we must first discover the dynamics and interconnectedness of the systems at play. Because gender roles and gender-based violence are threaded into our systems' fabric, we decided to include exercises that will give the women miners a structural understanding of the challenges they face.
Public Narrative
The Public Narrative framework, originally developed by Marshall Ganz of the Harvard Kennedy School, prepares participants to lead change in impactful ways, through accepting leadership responsibility and motivating others to join them on behalf of a shared purpose. Public Narrative consists of building the stories of self, us, and now. This framework will be the starting point to incentivize women to build a movement and organize around shared hopes, challenges, and actions.
Creative Capacity Building
Creative Capacity Building is a methodology that teaches a flexible method for problem-solving, exposing individuals to a framework that can be used to solve everyday challenges in their community and concrete hands-on skills to design technology and business development solutions to those challenges. Participants become active solution-finders, not just passive recipients of solutions from the outside.
Stakeholder Involvement
We are interested in considering and involving every stakeholder, not only the direct beneficiaries. We conducted a virtual stakeholder mapping workshop to visualize the people involved, their interest in the project, and their power to influence outcomes. We are designing the program experience so that it will provide touchpoints with each of these stakeholders.
Co-Design
Women miners have been involved in the experience design and development process from the start. A needs assessment workshop held in 2019 allowed for this first relationship building.
Design Principles
⚡ Design for a safe space first.
⚡ Incentivize collective leadership.
⚡ Be mindful of the cultural differences and contextualize every detail.
⚡ Allow for real-time adaptation as women's needs emerge throughout the experience.
👉🏽 This is an on-going project and we are currently working on this phase.
Ideation + Experimentation
We hold weekly team meetings to design and develop the workshops' experience. We ideate on different activities and review the flow throughout the 3 months of the program duration. Asynchronously, each focuses on designing and prototyping different elements of the proposed solutions.
Activities
Roadmap
Deliverables
◽ Final MEL Report
◽ Final version of the Movement-building methodology
◽ Training materials
◽ Facilitator guides and tools
◽ Case Study
Challenges + Risks
Mitigation Strategies
Increased COVID-19 cases in Colombia, resulting in a longer quarantine period.
- Virtual focus groups.
- Surveys over Whatsapp data collection for gender analysis.
- Flexible scheduling that adapts to changes.
Increased violence (armed groups/narco-traficantes) in Colombia.
- Move beneficiaries to a safe space training workshops.
- Create collective leadership rather than individual leaders.
- Provide tools for mitigating violence from armed groups.
- Ensure that the municipal government is aware of all activities so that they can support and protect.
The four communities potentially have limited time for the project post-COVID because they prioritize re-engaging in economic activity.
- Impress upon participating women the importance of movement building (including advocacy building component) to enhance the livelihood (particularly economic gain).