The new normal is kinda getting old. It’s a story we have now told many times: we move all of Umuzi’s training into fully remote learning programmes. But what was initially disruptive has now opened up many new opportunities and exactly a year on since South African’s first hard lockdown, we’re starting to see some of these opportunities come to life. In this case, it’s about the exciting things our team is doing with Design Thinking in education.
Umuzi has built up a bit of a name for itself in the Design Thinking space. Every recruit and Alumni, despite their career stream, has learned and practised Design Thinking and have impressed employers with their problem finding and solution creating skills. What used to be an in-person facilitated process is now too online. We shared the results of our first remote design sprint at the start of the year. Today, we’ve got more exciting innovations from our recruits to share, as well as an announcement of how our Design Thinking for education is going open source and will be available to anyone as part of the African Coding Network.
First things first: Let’s see the latest innovations from the learners!
Germinate
Having looked at the problem facing young entrepreneurs out there we have come up with an idea that resolves all their business growing pains. The germinate app creates a meeting space for successful entrepreneurs to mentor and help new and aspiring entrepreneurs to also make a success of their business ventures. Germinate will be a one-stop app for aspiring entrepreneurs to find information, guidance, and mentor-ship to help grow their business. What makes germinate differently is that you can actually interact with your mentor through the app by simply just booking a time slot on their calendar. We know that as entrepreneurs your days can be hectic, and this design makes life more convenient as you can get help on the go. If you have something you are good in, an area of expertise, you can also give back to other entrepreneurs by helping them with what you are good at. What we are creating is a community of like-minded people that are interlinked and working with each other to grow our economy.
As John Donne said, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main.” Entrepreneurship can be a lonely road but with germinate, you have a sense of community.
Fundanathi App
Due to lockdown regulations to protect primary and high school learners against the pandemic, a lot of students can only go to school twice, sometimes thrice a week, with gaps of missing out on school for weeks in between. These schools don’t have any resources to support online learning, and parents are concerned that this is too much idle time that eats away at the child’s brain capacity and also affects the child’s morale. Parents also feel helpless and overwhelmed for they’ve always left the responsibility of teaching to teachers.
The Fundanathi App addresses all these concerns and challenges. It’s an app packed with organised learning material and tools to empower parents by making it simple for them to be involved in, and accountable for, their children’s education. It’s an app that ensures that learning can continue even while at home. It’s an app that brings order to the madness.
Tirisano
Tirisano (working together for Xitsonga) is an app that was created to bridge a communication gap between community members and their local councillors. Often times, people witness faults and criminal activities in their neighbourhoods, but because of the unfortunate norm that has become of disregarding people’s grievances or even just the lack of better communication platforms between community members and their councillors, we saw it of best interest to create an app which serves as the middle-man, to better establish effective communication between the two parties.
Skills Applied
Our app is called "skills applied" as it helps the professionals we targeted to upskill themselves and move into a new industry and meet peers in the same predicament so that they can go through the "growing" journey together. Our focus was on the hospitality industry and how the pandemic affected them. The app and process might help them get over some harder hurdles
Announcing the African Innovation Design Sprint
We’ve so been impressed at these amazing peer-led projects using our remote design thinking template on Figma. We’ve officially made our Figma template available for any learner or team to tackle some real-world challenges while learning Design Thinking.
You can download the template from Figma by clicking on the file below:
