IDEO.org

IDEO.org applies principles of human-centered design to alleviate poverty. This organizational effectiveness grant will support a research project on the impact that design has on the social sector to inform a new strategic plan and a new monitoring and evaluation framework. IDEO.org is the leading design thinking firm working in the social sector. This project will allow them to advance build their organizational strategy and more clearly capture the impact that their work has made. This will serve IDEO.org but also the broader human-centered design field.

IDEO.org applies principles of human-centered design to alleviate poverty. This support would allow IDEO.org to deepen its partnership with Marie Stopes International-US (MSI), completing the final phases of the redesign of MSI’s services for young people in Zambia and initiating a new collaboration in a second country to address the same question of how human-centered design might improve reproductive health services for young people. The current collaboration in Zambia has shown promising early successes in increasing the number of young people using MSI’s services. IDEO.org proposes to build this experience and apply the same human-centered design approach with MSI’s program in Mali to uncover insights specific to the Malian context and surface opportunities for youth-centered reproductive health programming in Bamako and surrounding urban areas.

IDEO.org is a San Francisco-based firm that uses the principles of design thinking and human-centered design to solve persistent social problems in developing countries. This grant would support a partnership between IDEO.org and Foundation grantee Marie Stopes International–US in Zambia to use design thinking to prototype new solutions that would increase the number of young women and men using reproductive health services. The Foundation expects this collaboration to provide innovative, scalable, and sustainable solutions for youth reproductive health services, and to demonstrate the value of design thinking to the field more broadly as a different approach to increase the use of reproductive health services. This grant is proposed as part of the Foundation’s new strategy to use new tools and approaches to make sure no woman has an unintended pregnancy in sub-Saharan Africa.