GEDS Empowered Youth in Digital Innovation During the Syrian Refugee Crisis

GEDS Empowered Youth in Digital Innovation During the Syrian Refugee Crisis

The Brief.

GIZ, an international organization that supports the German Government in achieving its objectives, asked us to design a 4-day workshop to support their program which aims to empower youth from Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey in digital innovation during the Syrian refugee crisis. Our role was helping them to define the problems and provide solutions that the for view as critical to their community, fellow immigrants, and the host country citizens. This project was under the Qudra program of GIZ which is an Arabic word meaning ‘strength, ‘ability’ or ‘resilience.’

The Approach: We had two types of challenges:

The attendees were coming from different countries and spoke 3 different languages. The aim was to make them work together. Therefore, separating groups according to the languages was not possible.
This was not a training workshop. Creating real solutions to the real problems couldn’t be more needed with the attendees who have limited access to possibilities like this one, thanks to GIZ and the EU and the German Government. Our approach to solutions was twofold:

Based on our experience in MATUROLIFE where we run workshops in 9 countries in 7 languages, wee printed all canvases in 3 languages. We kept the main language as Turkish, had slides in English and featured real-time translation to Arabic. We created problem pitching experiences where people who live these problems and have real experiences could pitch to the problems. Then we asked the teams to be formed around these problems.

The workshop lasted for 4 days. In details;

The first day consisted of three exercises that are designed to generate the problems that they encounter in their daily life. The exercises consisted of a story building activity, creating an environment of open communication, to identify any obstacles or problems that they face in their lives, picking a problem from the previous exercise that they thought was promising and worth a follow in the next three days.

The agenda of the second day was focused on conducting online literature research, which is called secondary research. A brief lecture on how to conduct the research and how to generate research questions was given. The teams were informed on how to ask the correct questions in order to get the information that they need toward producing a solution for their problem.

The third day of the workshop was built around analyzing their potential user profile, the daily journey of that user, and ideation based on the issues that their user faces. This exercise allowed them to humanize their theoretic user, and feel empathy toward him or her. The teams worked on this exercise, discussed their users’ journey, and produced a map that visually described the user journey.

The last day of the workshop was focused on creating preliminary prototypes of their solution, and iterating these prototypes into higher fidelity prototypes for the final presentation. The goal of this canvas was to allow teams to create a layout or a detailed structure of what their concept is, what it solves, why it solves and how it solves. The style of their prototypes was determined by their ideas.

About This Project.

GIZ, an international organization that supports the German Government in achieving its objectives, aims to empower youth from Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey in digital innovation during the Syrian refugee crisis. They had a series of training to empower them with the necessary skills. GEDS supported GIZ with design and problem-solving skills.

In conclusion, running a program in 3 languages went quite smoothly. Our client GIZ was very pleased to see that the attendees developed rapid prototypes. Some of the problems that they worked on are as follows: People losing their upper limbs needing a prosthesis, refugees lack communication with society, discrimination and social adaptation problems faced by refugee children in a school environment, false and non-neutral news about refugees, the problem which the Syrian refugees encounter in hospitals due to language barrier.

As the GEDS team, we were very pleased to be part of this mission.