IDEO.org Fellow Adam Reineck and his IDEO.org team kick off a project in Kenya designing new opportunities for a company that equips low-income young people with digital skills and education opportunities leading to longterm employment.

IDEO.org has started a new project with Digital Divide Data in Kenya. DDD's mission is to train disadvantaged youth in basic services such as data entry and document digitization while also offering them scholarships to access a university education. The organization started in Cambodia in 2001 and has expanded into Laos and Kenya over the last few years. DDD already has a number of clients overseas such as prominent universities and publishers that use their services, and will be working with IDEO.org to better understand the challenges and opportunities in the local Kenyan market.

Based upon what our IDEO.org team has learned so far, it appears that the sales process for DDD services in Nairobi currently takes a long time to complete, and many businesses drop off for a variety of reasons. We know that there are many local companies in Kenya with large unorganized warehouses of old records that would greatly benefit from better systems and document digitization, but many are not ready to take the first step to better organization. We want to find out why this is happening, and connect the needs of local businesses with what DDD has to offer.

Our IDEO.org team includes Salvador Zepeda and me (Adam Reineck) from IDEO.org, with Apeksha Garga, a design research specialist on loan from IDEO. We've spent the last week conducting background research about DDD and their services, and preparing for the long trip to Nairobi on May 22nd. Some of the activities we've been doing over the last week include preparing our research plan, preparing an on-the-ground discussion guide, and creating a number of tools and prototypes that will help us in the field as we interview current and potential clients of the company.

One exercise we created consists of a number of cards that each have a drawing of a service that DDD could offer. We're interested in testing a more customized service experience that could help the sales teams easily build a workplan that potential clients both need and desire.

An example of a prototype we’ve created is an interactive iPad chart that has a number of generic inputs a potential client might consider, such as useful space, time spent retrieving files, lost files, and speed of processes. We are imagining that this prototype could be a tool for sales associates to roughly calculate the amount of time and money they could save by using DDD's services. One of our first goals as we set out is to help DDD better communicate the value of their services in new and creative ways that local businesses can understand how better processes might improve their bottom line.

Our next stop is Kenya! Stay tuned for updates from the field.