This case study by a pan-African UX research and design agency offers key insights for companies attempting to...
Tag: Africa
Decolonizing LLMs: An Ethnographic Framework for AI in African Contexts
This paper examines LLM deployment through African lenses that engage the continent’s complex social,...
Operationalizing Ethnographic Research to Grow Trust in Digital Financial Services
Case Study—Trust motivates people’s uptake and use of digital financial services (DFS). Understanding the socio-cultural determinants of DFS trust are needed to scale financial access and drive financial inclusion. These are core components of international development strategies, such as the...
The Transformative Potential of Participatory Research in International Development Programming
In 2022, UNICEF launched the Adolescent Girls Programme Strategy to enhance programming for adolescent girls,...
What is a Sustainable Innovation? Cultural and Contextual Discoveries in the Social Ecology of Cooking in an African Slum
This paper investigates how a close understanding of human activity can inform the design of culturally and contextually sustainable innovations for subsistence markets. Building on existing literature related to poverty alleviation initiatives and an ethnographic field study, this project...
Mannequins on My Mind: Addis Ababa and the Globalized Economy
You’ve probably been there—in a security line at Laguardia airport, still fuzzy with jet lag. I stood in one recently—just a few days after returning from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia—and certain quotidian details of life in the US were still jumping out in shocking relief. In front of me were two women...
Co-creating Your Insight: A Case from Rural Ghana
As Africa becomes the next frontier for consumer innovations, researchers and designers will be faces with a challenge: how can one get deep and meaningful insights on ever-accelerated project timetables? The following case study offers one such possibility. Drawing on work in rural Ghana, I...
What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa?
Book Review: What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa? Edited by Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga 256 pp, MIT Press "Imagine a positive Africa—creative, technological, and scientific in its...