Overview
Children growing up in Nicaragua’s Northern Atlantic Autonomous Region face numerous constraints that make it difficult to thrive. Home to the largest concentration of indigenous and Afro-descendant children in the country, the region is also one of the poorest and most prone to natural disasters. This is discouraging as the country as a whole is the second poorest in the Western Hemisphere and the world’s fourth most vulnerable country to climate change.
The complexity of these interwoven factors is a reminder that context does matter. When the region’s government and council decided to develop a Regional Policy for Children, it became clear that the policy needed to be crafted in response to these contextual complexities and not as a product of wishful thinking of well-intended people.
The human-centered design is a methodology that combines rigorous inquiry and creative analysis, drawing on the tools of ethnography, journalism, and systems thinking. Design thinking helps designers develop products that people want. It can also help policymakers put themselves in the shoes of the people they are trying to serve with their policies, understanding what they truly want and care about, and what is possible given available resources.
In the course of eight months, a multi-sector working group composed of members of the Regional Council and Government in the Northern Atlantic Autonomous Region, supported by UNICEF Nicaragua and Reboot, a global social enterprise, journeyed through an interactive and innovative path to develop a human-centered Regional Policy for Children:
- Identifying challenges using a quantitative survey (Lots Quality Assurance Sampling)
- Building empathy and understanding priorities behind the numbers (over 350 people reached through design research tools, including children taking pictures of their favorite and least-liked parts of their communities)
- Making connections and finding entry points (co-synthesis of findings and identifying policy objectives)
- Peeling the onion (in-depth investigation to understand causes and bottlenecks, using service trials to make policy-makers understand people’s lived experiences from multiple angles)
- Re-imagining the future (through a variety of design exercises, findings became actionable opportunities for the regional policy)
Please get in touch with us if you would like to:
- Share examples of the human-centered design in action in development work.
- Know more about the process.
- Support implementing some of the innovative and context-specific interventions coming out of the Regional Policy for Children.
