Design Thinking in Zimbabwe

I recently returned from an Engineers Without Borders (EWB) assessment trip in Nyadire, Zimbabwe, a United Methodist Mission in the Northeast region. The EWB process requires a community to submit an application for a project that they would like to work on with an EWB Chapter. I had been to Nyadire twice before and already had connections with the community. So when our Carnegie Mellon EWB chapter was looking for a new international project, I jumped at the chance to connect the two communities.

Nyadire identified a need to address issues related to the inconsistent power provided by the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority (ZESA). One of the issues was how dark the community gets after 6pm with or without power. This problem evolved into the lighting project that our EWB chapter is working on currently.

During the assessment trip two students, two mentors, and I started by going around to each department at the mission to understand how their daily lives and jobs are affected by the lack of electricity. We found it very difficult to glean honest answers from the people we met because it was difficult not to prime them with ideas we were already considering. We were able to learn a lot about the community by understanding how each separate department runs, but I think it would have been significantly more valuable to use a design thinking approach for our assessment trip. It may even be valuable for EWB to require this approach for all assessment trips in the future. EWB already requires a lot of paperwork, so the implementation of such an approach may be difficult, but I think the end result will be an increase in successful projects around the world.

If you are familiar with Engineers Without Borders, do you think the implementation of design thinking would be possible and/or valuable for the organization? And if you are not familiar with Engineers Without Borders, it is an organization worth taking a look at as it relates directly to social innovation.