Masmirah Project
Through the eyes of an apprentice Innovation practitioner
Joining any new team can be terrifying. Joining a new team that you can’t meet in person, whilst tying to onboard working remotely from your bedroom (thanks COVID) and being thrust into supporting a succession of design sprints with no prior knowledge was a pretty intimidating prospect. But the rapid pace at which I had to grasp innovation and human centred-design (HCD) methods has been such an interesting learning experience. So much so, that I’d like to online a few key learnings from the Masmirah project and share the view from my first 6 months.
I am assuming you are where I was 6 months ago: just starting your innovation practise. So, let’s begin with a brief explanation of Innovation at Plan International. The Innovation team was formed 3 years ago with the aim of creating impact for girls at scale through gaining a deep understanding of girls’ needs and the issues that matter to them. The (small but mighty) team oversees a dedicated Innovation Fund. Anyone within Plan International can apply to the fund if they have an innovative idea that they want to explore. The autonomy of the fund allows us to test new ideas and experiment where there is potential for significant impact and scale. Everything we do is founded in Girl-centred Design methodologies, meaning that the unique aspect of Innovation Fund projects is that they are co-designed together with the people closest to the problem, specifically girls, so that they can influence their own futures.
A key concept in innovation is that failure is our friend, as it is within failure that the most potent learnings arise. Masmirah is by no means an example of a failed project, but it does highlight a few fundamentals of the innovation mindset — that we must challenge assumptions and pivot based on learnings.
Masmirah, formerly BEST (Better parenting Education to reduce Stunting), project was an Innovation Fund idea created by the Plan Indonesia team in 2018. The vision was to provide information to parents and caregivers in an engaging and interactive way so that they can quickly adopt practices which reduce child stunting.
Here’s some background on the problem domain: in Indonesia 1 in 3 children under the age of 5 are stunted (36.4% according to the 2018 Global Nutrition Report). This is more than 10% higher than economically similar countries, that have an average stunting rate in children of 25%. Interventions in the first 1,000 days are crucial in giving children a chance to reach their growth and development potential. The current approaches in Indonesia to tackle stunting have not been successful, predominantly due to a lack of understanding of the context where the issue is most prevalent. For example, the distribution of printed parenting booklets and flyers into communities were not reaching audiences or changing behaviours because of low literacy levels in those communities and the material just was not engaging — this highlights a failure to understand the lived experiences of parents.
We set out to do something about this: how might we improve expectant and new parents/caregivers’ knowledge around child health and nutrition in the first 1,000 days so that we can reduce stunting?
The initial solution idea was to create free educational games that would provide context-specific health and nutrition advice to expectant and new parents and caregivers. Several game types and communication channels were explored: scenario-based games hosted on Interactive Voice Response (IVR), SMS, and a chatbot with visual imagery. However, the design research showed that many of the early assumptions were wrong, forcing the team to take a step back and re-assess. Through user interviews, focus group discussions, and the deployment of rapid prototypes it was understood that parents and caregivers are interested in receiving nutrition knowledge by listening to clear, simple, straightforward messages with the option to repeat information and not gamified information.
During prototyping, the IVR service proved the most popular with parents and caregivers to disseminate information about stunting. The IVR system is an interactive phone call, where mothers can navigate their ways though information and messages (see user journey maps below).
Enter the pilot phase. The primary learning objective was to determine if an IVR service with informative messages helps mothers gain knowledge around child health and nutrition in the first 1,000 days of life to help them reduce stunting. The methodology consisted of the project team travelling to Posyandus (community-based health centres where mothers would go monthly to meet with midwives) to promote and register interested mothers onto the IVR service.
When this phase kicked off, I was working closely to support the project team in Indonesia. We would have daily calls to discuss progress, to address issues as they would arise and pivot the process where necessary. It was initially assumed that interested mothers would register at the Posyandu with the help of Plan staff. Despite the high level of interest from mothers, we quickly saw that registration was low. The reason for this was apparent, most mothers did not carry phones during the day as they share devices with their husbands or other family members who take the mobiles to work. In response, we quickly shifted the focus to promoting the service and handing out information cards so mothers could call up and register at a later stage. At the end of the first week, the registration rate was still low, but the number of mothers interested in the service was increasing. Mothers were just not calling up to register. To understand why we undertook a small call back survey, and it transpired that whilst the service was free to call in to, in Indonesia you need credit on your mobile to place even a free call. Pivoting again, we worked with our IVR provider partners Viamo, to iterate the registration process so that interested mothers would give their phone numbers at promotion and after 3 days if they had not registered, they would receive an outgoing registration call. We ensured that at promotion we asked mothers what time of day would be best suited to receive a call.
By using learnings to quickly adapt the process we were successful in registering ~140 mothers onto the system over the phase. We are now trying to measure outcomes by seeing if the IVR service has prompted mothers to make behavioral changes that could reduce stunting. To achieve this, we have undertaken call back surveys and are currently analyzing the responses. The initial findings are that 77% of call back survey respondents either directly mentioned a change in their behaviour or implied behaviour change after access Masmirah services.
The main takeaway that I’d like to leave you with is that success in innovation requires a highly iterative process. The key is to adopt a framework of continuous learning and accept the ensuing challenges to initial assumptions (or better yet make as few initial assumptions as possible). Masmirah is a good example of how the Innovation team carries the HCD framework into programming and, hopefully, it highlights how necessary it is to anchor our work in the lived experiences of those we are working with.
Innovation, with is fundamentals in HCD, is not just workplace jargon or a trendy buzzword, it is a reframing of how one thinks. It takes work to be self-reflective and leave any assumptions or sub-conscious biases at the door, but it is the only way to be able to truly do work that is centred in girls’ lived experiences. Listening to people is all well and good but actually hearing and observing the needs and wants of a group of people, that have completely different lived experience to oneself, is something totally different and a skill I hope to hone over time.
The Mashmira project is lead by Semuel Apsalon Niap and Silvia Devina from Plan Indonesia. If this has piqued your interest in Innovation at Plan you should read about another of our excellent ongoing projects Girls Out Loud!
