Design Thinking for Development Cooperation | Victoria Peter | TEDxBerlin

[Applause] this is Frank a 40 old farmer from the northeastern region of Ivory Coast along with 20 other participants he came to my workshop with a tiny glimpse of hope to find a solution out of rural poverty when I said to him that I didn't bring him a solution he looks at me and says I knew you were just another white empty promise wasting my precious time so I'm here today to tell you why I am a waste of time don't leave the room guys and I will also tell you why Frank changed his mind so essentially Frank is right despite decades of development aid and cooperation and billions of dollars flowing into the African continent almost half of the population is still poor and what I find even more shocking is how much of African Development African Development is still financed by external money and aid and besides all the graphs and bubbles and indexes that we have come up with about poverty do we still ask ourselves the question of why Africa cannot help itself I feel like that by focusing on analyzing complex problems of poverty and development we forget to think about what it actually means to be dependent on someone what being dependent on external aid means and does to humans what it does to societies so as I stand in front of Frank I am a white privileged Western woman in front of a black poor African farmer I find it important to spell this out loud because by realizing what I am buddy by being whites and the effect this has on the other mainly the non-white person has made me understand a lot of what I should and should not do and believe as a white person working in West Africa the perception of white supremacy is to let the core of most of the relationships of Africa and the outside world and especially its donors and by not naming it because we as white people are uncomfortable hearing it I think that we really fail our job so as a white Western and privileged woman whose hard things and beats with Africa I think we need to rethink development cooperation we need to start with Frank so if we are to start with Frank why don't we ask him the question of how he feels like if there's constantly someone taking on the front seat in his life refinance your cooperative because it worked elsewhere plant a tree because it will restore your ecosystem hey use democracy because in Europe it's a fantastic form of governance quite naturally no matter how well intended this relationship will lead to a loss of willingness and ability to create solutions to make and shape your immediate environments so without creation a society doesn't really create anything a society eventually becomes a recipient of input instead of a creator of output to me this is the moment a society loses it so it loses its citizens so quite logically no matter what you put into that society nothing sustainable or anything can really come out of it right because something in the middle has died so going back to the workshop and rule ivory coast I want to talk to you about another workshop participant madam banished a 60 year old female farmer who was illiterate she came up to me talking about her hopeless struggle to sell her agricultural products in the rural areas as to a lack of infrastructure a lack of market information and plat price fluctuations and many many many other things basically everything is well so I couldn't really tell anything I couldn't say anything four hours later when I'm coulibaly and her group of other woman present the very first home delivery service for agricultural products enroll Ivory Coast which works without financial aids but for the pooling of personal networks through the union of farmers associations and the creation of a harmonized offer Wow how did we get from absolute hopelessness to this in just four hours I tell you why creativity creativity is the ability to imagine yourself in a situation differently from what immediately meets the eye without creativity I cannot imagine what my product looks like other than the one I have in front of me I cannot imagine who my client could be other than one the persons that I already see so by the very nature of development a development cooperation call it as we may and the dependence resulting from it we have killed African space for creativity so people have to reconquer and redesign this space for creativity and so one way to get there is design thinking simply speaking design thinking is a process of creative problem-solving that allows anyone who is not trained as a designer to use the tools of a designer's toolkit like empathy or experimentation and create concrete solutions to a problem he has defined that is feasible desirable and viable we know this methodology generally from startup circles or innovation networks but what is interesting is that the very principles of the method of design thinking can actually be applied and found at the core of our problem of a dependency so a design thinking process has loads of different phases but one phase creates empathy and focus such that you actually really understand the problem that you want to tackle and take ownership of this issue and the solution that you will create afterwards the second phase uses brainstorming and ideation to stimulate your creativity to think beyond the obvious and think outside of the box in the process of creating your solution and another phase makes you create a very simple concrete test version of your solution very quickly and immediately go back to the end user for feedback this is actually an experience of collective intelligence to arrive at a concrete solution this is the moment of tension frank is back as you know he wasn't really happy in the beginning well after four hours of design thinking he came up to me and said I'm sorry I did not trust you but you gained our confidence by showing us once and for all we need to take our future back into our own hands and that we can actually create solutions ourselves by engaging citizens all over ivory coast in eight workshops six workshop facilitators inspired 150 farmers and youngsters to retake ownership of their own situations and contributed to the emergence of 25 concrete citizen driven solutions for the agricultural sector four out of these six workshop facilitators were young locals that never anim facilitated a Design Thinking workshop before tomorrow these four can train 10 others in design thinking methods to inspire a movement of engaged citizens solving the challenges of their country so does this mean design thinking is the magic bullet we got it all the problems of Africa are solved honestly when I first arrived in West Africa I did not believe in the impact that creativity and collective intelligence could have on the poorest very remotely living and illiterate populations that I encountered but bit by bit and workshop by workshop all the doubts and questions that I had vanished when looking at the people coming out of the soup of the workshops that we organized so Design Thinking is so much more than just a method of challenge solving design thinking can actually be a method that helps us really completely reshape and rethink development cooperation by putting development back into the hands of those concerned citizens so to start this rethinking I would like to end with three main points first and foremost I think that we need to actively counteract the omnipresence and so misleading picture of the rich European educated person that comes to help the poor African uneducated person this is why I try my utmost to take on the passenger seats and I also try not be to be that annoying passenger kinda says like go to the right go to the left no I try to keep back and I think that's in the face of past and current failures of development aid and development cooperation I must be more humble more passive and constantly self-critical of what I bring to Africa being a workshop facilitator is an ideal way of learning this secondly the results that come out of creative processes and citizen engagement will not reflect what we judge good or just when regaining their creative space citizens will develop their entrepreneurial models their forms of governance and eventually their African utopia we have to stop once and for all make our aids conditional on our ideas even if this idea is called sustainable development last but not least Design Thinking can actually be just as powerful of a tool for any actor in development cooperation be this NGOs institutions companies governments but making us explore multi-stakeholder collaboration or engaging citizens in donor countries in completely different ways with problem of problems of the African continent with the with a philosophy of design thinking at heart any projects can accelerate active citizen engagement if we really believe in Africa's emergence we have to believe in its people and the ability to make choices and design solutions and we have to be more humble about what we've proposed and with Design Thinking a powerful tool to engage citizens along the way is right at hand so once regained their creative space and their space for citizen engagement I'm utterly optimistic that African societies will be good ones that will manage to transform their beautiful culture of joy of living redistribution of wealth pride and so many other communitarian values into fruitful sustainable and above all inclusive societies thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 13,585

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Social Science, Education reform, Food, Health, Social Entrepreneurship

Id: Qa1GdlXJk30

Length: 13min 14sec (794 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 27 2017