PSI Niger and YLabs joined forces to apply a human-centered design (HCD) approach to develop a tailored intervention which embodied comprehensive community insights into how religious beliefs and health needs can be leveraged to improve support for birth spacing and contraceptive use in Niger.
In this HCD process, the team learned a tremendous amount along the way — how to navigate discussions on taboo subjects with sensitivity and care; how to take an intangible idea and turn it into a rough prototype to test; how to use Hausa proverbial expressions to better convey our questions and ideas to our participants in Zinder; and, importantly, how to pivot in our approach when design research revealed surprising and unprecedented findings.