Theory of Change
Developing and strengthening creative capacities enhances women’s ability to define and act on goals (aspirations), make decisions that matter to them (agency), and participate in the economy and public life (sustainable livelihood).
Young low-income women in Latin America need skills and resources to reach sustainable livelihood outcomes. The kind of skills and resources provided to them are often externally imposed and do not foresee the long-term, substantive effects and changes to women’s lives. Therefore, they also need agency and freedom to identify and find solutions to the complex challenges they face and to achieve the wellbeing goals they personally aspire.
How might we support and strengthen women’s capacity to tackle their pressing challenges, find innovative solutions with agency, and achieve the sustainable livelihood they aspire to?
Mink'a is a platform that provides young low-income women with the resources to make free and informed choices about their lives by helping them define their aspirations and guidance to achieve them. They do so through a creative capacity-building framework. We believe that a creative process allows for effective problem solving and supports self-confidence, curiosity, and the need for self-realization. Through Mink'a, women design their paths to well-being.
Mink'a partners with organizations working with women in Latin America to provide access to this personal development experience.
Mink'a is the result of a year-long independent project developed as part of the Harvard Master in Design Engineering Program. I strategized, and designed a scalable experience.
Some of the key activities involved:
- Identify end-user needs and behavior through gender-informed participatory action research workshop.
- Developed needs assessment and gender analysis tools, semi-structured interviews, a survey, and a lean-data approach for long-term success evaluation of the program.
- Assessed the qualitative and quantitative data gathered and synthesized research insights.
- Produced all graphics, visual components, and objects by defining requirements for brand-aligned user experience.
Research + Discovery
Across all of Latin America, women and men differ in their ability to make effective choices in a range of spheres, with women being typically disadvantaged. Low-income women, particularly in the informal economy, are in a specially unfavorable position to access the resources and build the skills they need to make these effective choices. To better understand the challenge I was trying to solve and the women I wanted to design FOR, I collected secondary research data.
I understood that to address this challenge effectively, I not only needed to design for the women, but they also needed to be involved; I needed to design WITH them. To do this, I found two key partners and collaborators—El Ordeño, an Ecuadorian B-Corp that works with small-scale milk producers, and the MIT D-Lab that works with women artisanal miners in Peru. These organizations share an interest in helping women achieve sustainable livelihood.
🇪🇨 Community-immersion trip > Turucuho, Ecuador
🇵🇪 Community-immersion trip > Secocha, Peru
The purpose became to design an enabling environment or platform, so the women could be active creators of their individual and communal well-being, sustainable livelihood, and unlock their agency. This meant that I had to design for these women and include them to design with them, yet what is of utmost importance is to make design BY them possible.
Insights gathered on this fieldwork action research and desk research conducted over nine months supported the hypothesis that creativity instills a sense of agency, promotes self-confidence, and encourages the ability to actively create for one’s well-being.
Building Personas from Research Insights
Designing Mink'a
Design Principles
⚡ Adaptable - serves women in different contexts in Latin America.
⚡ Inclusive - considers women's different levels of education, skills, and interests.
⚡ Self-paced - adapts to women's schedule and availability.
⚡ Accessible - provides access to contextualized and adapted learning and development resources that otherwise will not be available.
⚡ Collaborative - meant to be experienced as a group and create a network of support.
Value Proposition
A value proposition was determined with key stakeholders and experts.
Mink'a: the seeds of agency
Network of groups, facilitators, and coaches
Guides, tools, and activity kits
A life design process: evaluate, voice, examine, realize
Learning ways of thinking, ways of working, tools for working, skills for living in the world
The Mink'a Experience
The proposed experience, like any creative process, depends on moments of divergence and convergence. This is overlays the proposed aspirations framework. What makes the women move along is the support they receive from the facilitators and mentors, resources are made available to women in form of contextualized tools, and a 21st-century life skills curriculum is taught.
Prototyping
The first tools and activity kits were co-designed, prototyped, and tested on-site with the women.
❕To bridge the literacy barriers, I used stickers and drawings.
Taking what I had learned by working on-site, I iterated the design and developed additional tools and kits.
The local facilitator training sessions were tested using a Facebook Group for Social Learning. Facebook is a platform that many women are already familiar with, and they access it easily and frequently.
I presented my research, prototypes, and testing results to a panel of 10 industry critics, as well as over 50 other participants in the audience.
"This is beautiful work and really inspiring. I love the design of your packet. It is very approachable." - Ana Pinto Da Silva, UX Designer
"Having a community member trained as a facilitator is very smart and also enhances agency." - Libby McDonald, Development Practitioner
"Mink'a is a clear example of practicing Respectful Resign, which is not only a gender-based framework but also a decolonizing practice." - Arianna Mazzeo, Design Researcher
"It is great the way you have focused on this issue. The greatest part is your understanding of the daily life of these women, and you have catered to respond to their needs." - Bryan Boyer, Public Sector Innovator
👉🏽 Follow-up action resulted in forming a team to make Mink'a a reality. The initiative has become a social impact startup in Ecuador, and we are working on the next steps of this journey.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Mink'a is iterating and adapting to become a digital product. We expect that the Mink'a experience can eventually become hybrid as I experienced first-hand during the contextual immersion trips how valuable is for women to have a shared safe space.
More on Mink'a digital platform coming soon. Stayed tuned to https://www.somosminka.org/