Académie de l’Artisanat - Helping Girls in Benin Take Control of their Reproductive Future and Their Financial Life

“As designers, we do research to get inspired. When we begin a project, we immerse ourselves in the lives of the people we’re designing for.”

The report summarises the human-centred design (HCD) process that led to a pilot project called L’academie de l’artisanat (the handcraft academy), a craft workshop where out-of-school girls and young women learn skills that will allow them to earn some money while they learn about family planning and contraception. The goal of the project was to increase demand for contraception amongst out-of-school adolescent girls in the town of Dassa-Zoumè in Benin. Implemented by IDEO.org, an organisation specialising in HCD, in partnership with Population Services International (PSI), this work is part of Transform-Phare, a five-year (2014-2019) United States Agency for International Development (USAID)-funded initiative designed to infuse innovative practices from a range of disciplines into USAID-supported social and behaviour change communication (SBCC). Transform-Phare emphasises "creative thinking, exceptional design and high-quality production and implementation".

As explained in the report, “Académie de l’Artisanat is a new take on vocational learning, one that builds agency by inspiring girls to learn new skills, and leverages that agency to help them make smart reproductive health decisions for their future. At its core, the Académie is a weekly workshop just for girls. It has three components:

• “SHE MAKES - Every Académie starts with making. An instructor teaches girls a new craft, such as beading, cooking or soap-making. Girls learn how to make the craft, and to sell it.
• SHE LEARNS. - While girls work on their crafts, a health educator teaches them about contraception, and the role it can play in protecting their futures.
• SHE’S IN CONTROL - At the close of the Académie, she’s recognized for her talents, and nurses are on-hand to offer counseling and free services to girls who want them.”

"Académie workshops are 3 hours long and held at the Centre Jeune Amour et Vie, or other teen-friendly locations where sexual and reproductive health services can be offered. Girls can participate in as many workshops as they please; they can attend once, or come back each week. As they master a skill, instructors and health educators connect their ability to create and sell their crafts with their ability to protect themselves from unwanted pregnancy. Instructors can teach a range of skills, such as beading, baking and soap making."

The first part of the document describes the research insights gained from interaction with the target group, the identification of opportunity areas, and the development of behavioural archetypes that translated into a range of prototyping ideas from which the “L’academie de l’artisanat” emerged. In particular, the following 2 HCD key processes are described in detail in the report:

Insights - “Insights are the core fieldwork learnings that present opportunities for design. Insights are not necessarily the most frequent observations we saw in the field. They are patterns of observations that present us interesting tensions or challenges that let us see the problem from a different perspective: insights have design energy.” The project identified six insights which are explained in the report.

Behavioural archetypes - these are “qualitative, psychographic user segmentation that focuses on people’s needs and aspirations. Behavioral archetypes inspire solutions and unveil new, often ignored user segments. This opens up new possibilities of targeting for maximum impact.” Beyond schooling status, the project looked for what motivates teens to have sex and identified 4 behavioural archetypes among teen girls and 3 among teen boys in the Dassa-Zoumè area. Seven prototypes emerged from the process, from which the “Académie de l’Artisanat” was identified as the most promising.

The second part of the report then describes the design, objectives, and functioning of the “Académie de l’Artisanat” in some detail - how the project seeks to build agency in girls, work with health workers, and create a network of support with the community, particularly older women. It also looks at measuring impact and how to get to efficiency and scale. The importance of branding is also discussed, which for the “Académie de l’Artisanat” project was designed to inspire hope and trust, but also be rooted in the realities of the real world.

The final section of the report includes a guidebook “Live Prototyping Playbook - Step-by-Step Instructions for Testing Before Launch”, which provides guidance on how to set up, run, and gather feedback on the Académie de l’Artisanat.