Integrating Gender Lens in Human-Centred Design - Must A Questionnaire Always Be Used?

I was working on a PAYG school fees solution in an East African Country. After interacting with parents/guardians, district education officials, schools, students, financial institutions, community lenders, mobile phone companies and their agents using different questionnaires; an effective solution had been designed jointly with a team of developers and user experience designers. The buy-in process combined with HCD took approximately nine months as it involved behaviour change at multiple levels. On the D-Day of launching the solution, a half-day workshop was organised to take the parents through the solution and most importantly, I had worked with a partner to empower a teacher and a community facilitator to lead the session. Part of the workshop logistics included reimbursement of transport to parents and lunch arrangements. These unpacked insights that were not captured in the "formal HCD".

As part of embedding the digital payments culture, the parents/guardians were informed ahead of time that the reimbursement would be on mobile money. Everyone turned up with a phone. During the HCD, the data revealed only about 50% of the parents had phones and 20% had sim cards with no phones and would borrow a phone, insert sim card, complete transactions and retrieve their sim cards from the borrowed phones. Fascinated, I asked why everyone suddenly had a phone. Both male and female parents laughed and then one by one, they said the motivation was money. To ensure they didn't miss out on their share; they borrowed phones from family members, neighbours, and even agents who apparently hired phones for hourly use. This opened up the question of what motivates people to sign up for phones. Would that motivation ensure their continuous investment in data (airtime and internet connectivity)?

After the transport was reimbursed; all the female parents immediately paid all the monies into their children's wallets while none of the men made such a transaction. Interestingly enough, this phenomenon was seen even for couples who turned up together. The beauty with digital is you get instant analysis. So I posed the question back to the parents/guardians and again men and women gave diverse answers. The women didn't want their children to have the trauma of being sent back home for school fees. They put up any little money they secured in the child's wallet to gradually reduce the burden of school fees. They preferred to walk home instead and ensure their child/children were educated. The men planned to take a bike or public transport home, putting their comfort first. A debate ensued on how money was used at home. Some of the men immediately saw the wisdom in the women's approaches. About 10% then decided to remit their transport monies to their children's wallets.

Then came lunchtime. The lunch had amongst others soda and bread (this is a valued priceless delicacy in most rural communities and even urban communities). You give them bottled water and they will tell you "we drink water everyday. we want soda."

An interesting phenomenon emerged. The men in the session including the male teachers all gobbled their lunch. The female teachers, parents/guardians (including grandmothers) who had their kids in the same school only ate a small portion of the lunch; they saved the soda and the bread and some of the local food. One by one, they called their children/grandchildren and gave them the meals. During the wrap-up sessions, I again played back to the parents/guardians what I had witnessed. The women gave similar answers - that a child with an empty stomach couldn't learn and once in a while, it was good to give them a special treat for motivation. Normally the bulk of the breakfast included porridge and yams. The children would remember the treat for a long time and work harder. The men echoed that they too were tired of yams, sweet potatoes and so why not have soda, bread and rice for themselves?

Interestingly enough, there were no grandfathers. Grandmothers were taking care of their grandchildren after losing their sons or daughters to mostly HIV and AIDs and or road accidents. They followed the session keenly including how to make payments via mobile money, proving age was no barrier. And they remitted the payments via the platform.

Now, at this point, the manual data captured by the school bursar showed the trend on monies parents paid for meals for their children. Teachers had decried that a lot of school dropouts and poor performances were due to most parents not paying up for the three meals per day (one break in the morning and one in the evening; plus lunch). For boarders, it was four meals. When you took the existing manual data, it showed about 80% of female parents paid up the meals; and 20% two meals largely because they didn't have a steady source of income. About 10% of the male parents paid the full school meals; the rest would pay for two meals, one meal or none. Some children had to carry porridge from two days ago into school. Given the heat in the communities, the porridge was already stale. An unscripted debate happened on the importance of nutrition, the development of a child, and academic performance with again some committing to changing behaviours. Subsequent data showed spike in payment of meals.

What did the behaviour on meals mean? That I had to refocus the team's marketing of the solution and put an emphasis on fathers/male guardians paying for the meals through the PAYG solution.

Fast track, two terms later, after the schools had used the solution, and I was looking at data patterns, I noticed a spike in school fee payments every Thursday of every week and it was from male fathers or guardians. The second interesting data was though the payment of school meals had improved significantly, there was a drop in enrolments/retention with mostly the girl child dropping out.

I tracked the PTA calendars with the help of the community facilitators and partners and arranged to join sessions to play back the data to the parents and guardians. The question on why each week male parents paid school fees generated a buzz - laughter, some mumbling and then one woman stood up. She said her husband was a notorious drinker. He would disappear on Fridays and resurface on Monday mornings squandering all the monies he made during the week from odd jobs. So she applied the digital innovation to change his behaviour. Every Thursday, before entering the house, he would be required to produce the text message confirming school fees had been paid. Then she would query the school system using the unique child identifier and get a text confirming the updated balance of the child. This ensured the family resources were used effectively for the child's education. Other responses teemed in with different angles. The male parents or guardians thanked their female counterparts for always steering the family and looking for a better education for their children. A lot of them freely shared the stories of how they wasted money including in gambling for football matches, in get rich schemes, purchase of used junk motorcycles etc. In the formal HCD sessions, none of these insights popped up and all parents indicated commitment to child's education.

The girl child dropout was linked to the resources in the family. When the school fees resources dwindled, the family would sit down and decide the boy child would continue with the education to carry the family name. The girl child would be sent to the farm while they looked for a man to marry her and bear children. I didn't try to judge the community. All I asked them, is if they were able to access resources, what opportunity would they give the girl child? The session was abuzz with ideas that resulted in another session with a financial provider to discuss education trust funds, loans and crowd sourcing opportunities. The feedback from the community was that they didn't realise other means could give equal opportunities to all their children. The issue of children living with disabilities didn't go far as it was considered a taboo though I came across one or two families who had chained their children at home (either to a tree or to a shed). Some government officials didn't see a problem with that stating 'it was for their own safety." Changing that culture would need multiple negotiation sessions including alternatives for specialised care.

School fees was paid in kind and in cash. However, teachers and other school workers would share the in-kind contribution amongst themselves and underscore the value it translated to; in terms of school fees. One day, while reviewing the progress of the project and dropping into a school with a team I was working with; I found a stash of bananas, chicken, trays of eggs, sacks of yams etc in the head teacher's office. Any attempt to find out how that was recorded in the school hit a dead end. The firm answer was "teachers also have to eat." Would that child or children still be sent home even though the parents had parted with produce they could fetch a good sum from the market?

For some subjects, the students were not performing well. Further data analysis revealed specific teachers were responsible for the subjects. The teachers blamed the students and parents. Parents confirmed they had bought all the books required. I pulled the students on the side and they confirmed that the teachers had other businesses including farming and would sometimes attend school only once a week or in extreme cases once a month. When introduced the teacher attendance tracking, it was met with resistance but government officials reinforced it and the performance of students suddenly picked.

To conclude (the insights above are a drop in the ocean). Human-centered design (HCD) is defined as a research methodology that seeks to understand users' needs, behaviors, and experiences in order to design solutions and services that cater to their unique challenges and desires. It's applied across multiple industries such as design of digital financial services, facilities such as housing and airports, education, health, trade amongst other sectors. When integrating gender, you have to build matrices that track how men and women engage with services and underlying barriers and opportunities.

I have encountered a lot of organisations (big and small) that consider HCD a one-off process that commences with the design of elaborate questionnaires that have the input of a gender expert. In one extreme process, I witnessed an organisation that executed/concluded HCD interviews in a day. Mostly, when you challenge the approach; you will get responses like "What else can be learned?" and "We have worked with the traders, farmers, parents etc for so long that we know their needs and so this process is just validation of those needs". Yet they miss the opportunity of unpacking new approaches and even business opportunities. There is no problem using a questionnaire or other related approaches like focus group discussions, gender metrics etc.

The challenge with gender and if dealing with deep rooted social cultural issues, is that it takes more than a questionnaire and a few interactions to institute long term change. HCD (with gender lens) is a continuous process that sometimes need a combination of unconventional methods with data analytics to unpack (as shared in the insights above) and address emerging issues iteratively. The questionnaire and other initial research tools are a great launch pad but it's not an end.