Call for Application: Human Centred Design Experts and Coaches to Lead HCD Processes in Moyo and Obongi Districts – Uganda

Aga Khan Foundation

The Aga Khan Foundation (AKF) is an agency of the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN), a group of private, non-denominational development agencies that share a mission to improve the living conditions and opportunities of marginalized communities in target countries across Africa and Asia. AKF was established by His Highness the Aga Khan in Switzerland in 1967 and began working in East Africa in 1974. In Uganda, AKF operates a multi-sectoral portfolio that includes programming in Education, Economic Inclusion, Civil Society, Health, and Early Childhood Development predominantly in the Central and West Nile Regions. AKF is committed to ensuring that girls and boys, women and men, are equipped with the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values to help them interact effectively with the world and be contributing members of a pluralistic society.

Background

AKF, in partnership with World university Services Canada (WUSC), has been delivering the Adolescent Girls’ Education in Crisis Initiative, a four-year project focused on enabling adolescent girls and young women in Moyo and Obongi to pursue diverse educational and learning pathways. Critical to achieving this is the need to reduce socio-cultural barriers that inhibit of prohibit AGFY from accessing gender equitable, quality education (including SGBV and SRHR). To contribute to this, AGECNI has designed three explicit opportunities for AGFY, communities, and schools to design solutions and a campaign to address socio-cultural barriers to accessing school, staying in school and learning, and elevating the issues that drive gender inequity in their community. These are:

• Community design teams to address barriers to access
• School design teams to address issues of attendance, transition, and learning
• An AGFY led gender equity campaign to elevate issues of gender inequity

Purpose of the Design Teams

It is expected for there to be 10 community and 10 school design teams composed of (approximately five) diverse members who will undertake a HCD process to explore and identify the problem to be solved based on the everyday lived realities of AGFY in their community and school, to then design, prototype, learn, and iterate potential solutions to address these barriers. It is NOT expected for all solutions to be successful, but it is expected that, by the end of the process, these teams have developed approximately three Minimum Awesome Products to be further tested and incubated across more communities in 2023.

Purpose of the AGFY Gender Equity Campaign

It is expected for between 20-30 AGFY to be part of the core design team to undertake a HCD process to engage with their diverse experiences and other evidence assets (for example a situational analysis and rapid gender assessment) to explore and converge on a narrow campaign focus around gender equity issues in their communities. From this, the AGFY with lead, in collaboration with a communications and other experts as needed (e.g. graphic designer) to design, test, and iterate campaign strategies and materials to launch the campaign in October 2022. By launch, it is expected for there to be approximately 100 AGFY across Moyo and Obongi who lead and champion the campaign with a local ‘inner circle’ of other AGFY, boys, men, and community allies. The campaign is central to enabling target communities to actively address deep-rooted socio-cultural norms that serve to maintain and exacerbate gender and social inequity, including AGFYs’ access to education.

Scope of Work

The team of HCD experts and coaches will be expected to:

• Lead the design and delivery of the HCD processes with 10 community and 10 school design teams including, but not limited to:
  • Face-to-face workshops
  • On-going support

Recognising it is NOT expected for all solutions to be successful (as is the nature of these processes) critical to this will be supporting these teams to embrace learning from ‘failure’, funnel solutions, and effectively collaborate across communities to distil approximately three high impact community and three school-based solutions.

• Co-design the ‘incubation strategy’ to enable the high potential solutions to be further tested across communities in Moyo and Obongi in 2023
• Lead the design and delivery of the HCD process with between 20-30 AGFY to identify a narrow campaign focus and design and test campaign strategies and materials to maximise impact of the campaign. This campaign should:
  • Be AGFY led from the start to enable the campaign to enable AGFY to start owning the narrative around issues that affect them most
  • While focused, enable diverse narratives to be expressed through the campaign to recognise the diverse realities of different AGFY and the communities they live
  • Resonate with and allow inclusion of boys, men, and broader community allies and members
  • Go beyond ‘raising awareness’ and be action orientated to impact on broader community attitudes and behaviours to initiate societal change
• It is NOT expected for this team to be communications experts, graphic designers, etc., rather to collaborate with additional experts AKF will engage as greater clarity on who these may be becomes clear.
• It is expected that the HCD processes engage AKF, WUSC, Windle, and CSO partners in the process to support these team members to develop their knowledge and understanding of HCD.

Expected Qualifications and Experience

• Clear and deep understanding of HCD
• Demonstrated examples of delivering HCD in low-resource settings that have enabled design teams to collaborate and design high potential solutions for social change
• Ability to deliver HCD processes in contexts with a high linguistic diversity
• Working with AGFY and similar social issues
• A demonstrated legacy of working for positive social change
• Experience in complex and crisis affected geographies is an advantage

Commitment to respect safeguarding of vulnerable populations including children, women, the elderly, and people living with disabilities.