Building off of their previous prototype of a pop-up nail salon, the IDEO.org team working with Marie Stopes International in Zambia tests another prototype – a teen “speakeasy.”

As you may remember from one of our previous blog posts, we set up a pop-up nail salon one afternoon to have girl talk with teenage girls at the Mtendere district of Lusaka. At some point in our conversation we began to talk about birth control and had the girls ask us anything they were curious about regarding the methods. At the end, we invited the girls to come to a secret girl party that would happen one week later and waited to see if they would come. 

To our joy and surprise all of the girls we invited came back for the party! They brought the colorful headbands we had asked them to wear and a few brought some friends with them as well. 

Once they came in and got some snacks, we had the girls write on a small piece of paper the answer to the following question: "What have you always wanted to know about sex but have been afraid to ask?" 

They wrote their answer to the question on the little paper, rolled it up and put it inside a balloon; some girls blew up more than one balloon with questions. We then gathered in a circle, threw them in the center and mad dashed to pop them all!! Afterwards we each picked up a rolled up paper from the floor, which automatically randomized the exercise and left everyone holding an anonymous answer to the question. It was a fun way to share difficult questions and led to great discussions! (Thank you Meira for the game idea!) 

After we played fun energizing games, like "Find the Leader", we had one last birth control related game. In this game we had a game board on the wall, which held a grid of balloons (we were loving the balloon theme and kept it going). The grid was used to find the correct answers to questions and had the girls entertained by walking up to the wall and popping them to find the next question they needed to answer. We made this game because we wanted to see how much the girls remembered from our conversations, without putting anyone on the spot.