Through this partnership, we piloted a training centered on entrepreneurship.
Overview
My role: Co-author training for local market sellers across Guinea. Pilot training with local staff, then revise training based on pilot.
Project goal: Increase entrepreneurial practices among innovative product retailers in a central region of rural Guinea.
Areas of investigation: Local agricultural innovations + selling practices of market retailers + adoption of new methods among local farmers
Design process
This training was designed after we had worked in Guinea for 2 years and had conducted formative research in a similar geographic area related to agricultural, health, and nutrition behaviors. As our work was phasing out in Guinea, we created this participatory training so that a nascent project could apply agriculture and nutrition practices that we had found to be successful. With that said, it was crucial that we tested our product with its end users. Context matters — especially if you’re working to change behaviors!
Remote interviews: To prepare the pilot, we ensured that we spoke with project managers familiar with the exact context through remote interviews. Our discussions provided us with unique insights into selling practices and innovations that we would address in the training. These insights shaped much of our training content.
Co-design workshop + pilot: Through a co-design workshop, we piloted the training methods and content. Ask any farmer — the terrain greatly impacts your agriculture practices, and your livelihood rests getting it just right. We worked at this granular level of specificity.
Learning
The highlight of the workshop was a role play activity. We designed a role play activity at the end of the training. This proved to be the perfect method for participants to embody and demonstrate all that they’d learned.
Surprise: Men’s and women’s perceptions of who does what related to the production of given crops always differs – even among local experts!
What happened after? This training is a module in a larger entrepreneurship curriculum. After this pilot, we slightly modified the training and shared it with our partners, based in Guinea. A few months later, the first round of young entrepreneurs underwent the full training – with positive reviews of our module.
Reflections
Constraints can breed innovation. Our curriculum highlighted existing local innovations and focused on skills to market existing products so that communities could benefit from local entrepreneurs.
It’s projected that by 2050, 37% of the population in sub-Saharan Africa will be under 24 years old. Innovative methods to engage youth in community development are critical to livelihoods, well-being, and lifting many families out of poverty. These project staff are leading those efforts in Guinea – the project anticipates spreading new agricultural technologies to over 10,000 local organizations by 2020.
Team member sharing group work
Example of a participatory training exercise
Part of the pilot team