Our team of 12 split into two teams. I was a member of both. Half the team worked with the Ghana Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection in addition to the Ghana Education Service's Girls' Education Unit, GES GEU. The other half worked with a social enterprise called, TECHAiDE.
The Ministry of Gender has run girls Science, Technology, Math and Innovation (STMI) camps for over 25 years. STMI basically equates to STEM, Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, in other countries. The Director of Gender encountered a former camper who is now a doctor. The woman raved about the camp's positive impact upon her. Her enthusiasm touched and inspired the Director of Gender and sparked the idea to create a national mentoring network based upon past beneficiaries.
Since the STMI program began before computers were prevalent in Ghana, there were few contact details about previous campers. The team worked with the Ministry and GES using WhatsApp groups to organically grow the previous beneficiary list: a core group of 10 past beneficiaries added their friends' contact details, who then added their friends' until the network grew to about 100 past beneficiaries in a short time. A subset of those past beneficiaries completed surveys or were interviewed. This yielded seed mentors in the network.
The seed mentors were great for a start but represented a small fraction of the thousands of past beneficiaries. The team created a strategy and plan for growing the mentor network of past beneficiaries from Ministry and other organizations' programs. In addition, the team architected and prototyped a web-based solutions in which someone can register to be a mentor or request a mentor. Finally, the team created a set of processes and guidelines for actually running the mentor network program. All this they did in 30 days.
The team supporting TECHAiDE helped strengthen or create 25 core business processes in addition to architecting, designing and helping prototype a learning device specialized for aiding rural students. By addressing the business and technical ecosystem, the learning device has higher likelihood of being produced and distributed en masse.
The device delivers learning material in engaging ways such as games or what we call scenario-based stories. These are animated stories that have different outcomes based upon a user's decisions. The device also helps teachers improve their teaching skills by providing lesson plans and videos of lessons from top teachers in the country. This is very important because many teachers are not trained.
The device helps students by providing interactive quizzes that give feedback based upon student responses. It delivers empowerment education in the form of a Life Skills curriculum, something that can benefit boys, girls, men and women. Multiple units and lessons are in each of the 7 Life Skills modules: 1. Building Self-confidence, 2. Planning your Future, 3. Keeping your Body and Relationships Healthy, 4. Gender Equity, 5. Travel, 6. Financial Matters, and 7. Legal Rights.
The Life Skills lessons are delivered using a set of characters. For lack of any better way to explain this, it's a little like Sesame Street, only for adolescents. We created faces, personalities, relationships and places that will be used and re-used so that users develop a bond with the characters much like I have with Grover and Cookie Monster.
My fellow IBMers on both teams were outstanding. They did a ton of work and worked insane hours to get so much done in a short amount of time. I would feel honored and privileged to work with any of them again. The partners were excellent also: visionary and passionate about making widespread improvement in their country. It was truly an honor to work side by side with them too. Peace Corps staff and volunteers were fantastic as well.
What did I do specifically? Well, some on the team jokingly called me "General," but actually we were a very flat organization. I participated in the team's activities when they were here, pulling my weight. However, since I arrived before the rest of the team and remained afterwards, I did do some extra things. Here's a quick summary of the extra things I did as a Peace Corps Response volunteer:
- Helped write the statement of work for each project. To do that, I conducted current state assessments of both partners using an IBM tool called the Component Business Model.
- Working with the Peace Corps, conducted a survey about learning environments that helped prepare the team contextually
- Arranged for the team to visit 4 Peace Corps villages where we interviewed hundreds of students, teachers, administrators and parents
- Planned the Community Outreach Day - a collaboration between IBM, the Peace Corps and Ashesi University
- Our teams used "Design Thinking" which is a methodology for ensuring a human centered, context-based solution. Before the team arrived, I trained staff from both partners in Design Thinking.
- Created the definition of an empowered girl and wrote the empowerment curriculum in addition to writing some of the empowerment lessons, and training the empowerment content writer on various empowerment materials
- Created presentations to brief board members, apply for grant funding and approach venture capital firms
- Connected both partners and their projects to the Peace Corps and each other for ongoing sustainability
- Helped define the cast of characters, personalities, relationships and places to use in the empowerment curriculum
- Had regular meetings with IBM headquarters to discuss the pilot and provide feedback towards shaping this role.
Hats off to Agne, Akiko, Cheryl, Gus, Jacob, Jack, Kim, Nazmin, Nishant, Peter, and Tony...an outstanding Corporate Service Corps team who made my job really, really easy...or at least really really enjoyable when it wasn't easy.
Hats off to Mdm L, Mrs M, George, Mr. Q, Vivian, Kafui, FJ, Selassie, Edith, Freda, Mary and Musah. Ghana's future is bright with such talented, dedicated people.
Thanks to PYXERA Global, especially Barbara and Gavin for their tireless efforts.
Thanks to Ghana's best tour guide: Bismark.
Thanks to Angela for hosting us in Ghana.
Thanks to City Escape and its awesome staff, housing me for the last 3 months.
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