Nike Foundation / Girl Effect 100 Million Girls

Too often young women lack a safe forum to explore solutions to the problems that affect their lives. To get to the root of this challenge, a research team from frog spent a month in Nairobi with impoverished young women to design ways to bring them together.

We used research planning as a way to learn how the young women approach group work and to bring them into our design process. Together, we brainstormed ways that the girls could better communicate and solve problems in their local community. Then we started prototyping.

“Explorer Training” sessions, and a set of activities and take-home challenges built communication and collaboration skills among the group. Our challenges modeled simple forms of digital communication, such as threaded comments and news feeds, to see how the girls might use them in their local context.

The girls’ best ideas for creating connections were incorporated into a game: “Get Girls Talking.” Co-designed and built in-context over a four-week period, the game modeled digital and in-person interactions among local girls groups to collectively aid a girl in need. The prototype led to a second phase of design work with Girl Effect, Nike Foundation, and young women in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Bangladesh to explore how these local girl groups can form a global network through limited mobile technologies.