CFYE – Human-Centered Design Coaching of African Companies

Situation

The Challenge Fund for Youth Employment (CFYE) is a 6-year and €114 million programme funded by the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, that aims to create a prosperous future for 200,000 young women and men in the Middle East, North Africa, Sahel & West Africa and the Horn of Africa regions. The Fund will be supporting initiatives in 23 focus countries that will offer youth, in particular young women, opportunities for work that is demand-driven and productive, offering a stable income and safe working conditions, and that is contributing to their personal development and social protection.

After a highly competitive tender, CFYE has selected Proportion as their technical partner in supporting the fund applicants and investees on applying human-centered design within their companies.

Assignment

1. Support 20 companies and consortia in Kenya who are in the fund application phase, in making their proposals more youth-centered and customer-centered.
2. Support 10 companies in Nigeria who have been funded in making their value proposition and business case more youth-centered and customer-centered.
3. Now scaling up to companies in Lebanon, Sudan, and Egypt.  

Approach

Proportion kicked off with a remote 2-hour training on human-centered design for both the Kenyan applicants as well as the Nigerian companies who already got funded.  

We trained on three HCD tools that the companies could easily implement themselves:

1. User journey map
2. Empathy map
3. Value proposition canvas

• One-on-one coaching:
  Each company was offered multiple one-on-one coaching sessions:

1. Intake: to clearly identify and articulate their key challenges and assumptions why their product, service and business model would be a success
2. Advisory: advice them on how to conduct design research to further understand the challenges from a youths and customers perspective, and to validate assumptions.
3. 2nd advisory: based on the design research outcomes, we supported them how to use the key insights in strengthening their business strategy, how to innovate their product or service. 

Results

20 Kenyan companies and 10 Nigerian companies have developed human-centered design competences and applied those for improving their scale-up strategy to create more jobs for youth.  

• Anecdote #1: a company in Kenya has developed new food products, as a value addition on locally produced ingredients. Based on design research, they learnt that the taste and texture of product got really well received after tasting experiments, and through a Van Westendorp pricing analysis it turned out that the price could be much higher than assumed, increasing the viability of the company while also increasing the margin for the farmers.   

• Anecdote #2: A company in Nigeria has an agents model for offering mobile payment services to customers. After research, they have now improved the customer journey from a customers perspective, as well as the onboarding process for new agents (from campaign, selection, training and support of new agents)

After successfully supporting companies from Kenya and Nigeria, Proportion has now been contracting to support CFYE in all future cohorts across Africa during the coming 3 years. 

This project was commissioned by Challenge Fund For Youth Employment and led by Thomas and Proportion Global consultants in Kenya and Nigeria. If you’ve enjoyed reading this case and want to dive deeper, we’d love to hear from you and we will connect you with relevant designers like Thomas, who worked on this project Contact Us