Recent studies show that putting users first can be a game changer, giving organisations the edge – and helping to find new answers to some of the continent’s most intractable challenges.
When award-winning African energy startup Mobisol launched in 2011, its founders knew that they wanted to address electricity challenges in parts of rural Africa, but they had no clear idea how they were going to do that.
Instead, says Mobisol’s co-founder Klara Lindner, they made a point to first find out exactly what potential users wanted – and could afford.
Over a few field trips, the company discovered that people wanted electricity for more than just powering their lights, as was widely assumed at the time. They also wanted to keep their mobile phones, televisions and radios running. The researchers also learned that customers valued a sense of ownership, which allowed Mobisol to come up with a big-picture solution beyond just the right tech. The approach paid off. Today, Mobisol – since acquired by a French energy company Engie – provides over 150,000 solar-panel home systems to some 750,000 people in rural parts of Tanzania, Rwanda and Kenya.
At the heart of Mobisol’s approach was a little thing called empathy; the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. While you might think that this is a term more likely to be heard about on a yoga retreat, it’s finally getting the recognition it deserves in the world of business.
Empathy enabled Mobisol’s developers to better understand their customers thoughts, wants and motivations and to build a better product that people wanted to buy because it solved a real challenge they had. To say nothing of successfully addressing the thorny problem of energy access on the continent. In Africa, an estimated 600 million people do not have access to energy.
A graduate of Germany’s Hasso-Plattner Institute School of Design Thinking (or HPI D-School), Lindner calls the approach ‘service design’ or ‘human-centred design’, concepts that are embedded in design thinking. Design thinking, in its turn is a problem-solving model that is fast gaining traction in the world because of its growing reputation in improving products and services. Many consider it a way of thinking and being in the world and some of the world’s leading brands, including Apple, Google and Samsung, have internalised the approach. Leading universities around the world also teach the related methodology.
Design thinking’s origin story is fuzzy – a slow, organic courtship between architectural and engineering theory on the one hand, and management practice on the other. However, there is broad consensus that the approach takes its cue from how designers approached a task: yes, there is regimen, but also a lot of free-wheeling creativity that allows for cul-de-sacs. One writer, in tracing design thinking’s history, compared the “problem-focused” approach of scientists to the modus operandi of designers: “designers were solution-focused problem solvers who chose to generate a large number of solutions and eliminate those which did not work”.
Not being too attached to the outcome creates a lot of freedom and as such this is a mindset that is being put to work in finding creative and innovative approaches to many of the world’s complex and wicked problems that have defied solution from more conventional approaches.
Initially, design thinking found an apparently natural fit in the booming tech industry where companies were battling to stay one innovation ahead of each other. But a recent study shows that today it is being applied to a slew of problems across industries and contexts from manufacturing to health in Europe and the US. In Africa, too, the approach is gaining ground, not least because this is a continent that is rife with intractable challenges that urgently need new approaches. But more than that, Africa is also a literal land of opportunity where the innovative and the bold can almost certainly make inroads – as Mobisol did.
Examples abound of African innovators and companies applying the principles of human-centred design and service design in their inventions and businesses. From corporates like Deloitte, that uses design thinking to inform its strategy and delivery as well as to promote a culture of diverse insight, analytics, collaboration and observation to solve problems and develop new offerings for clients, to a host of mobile phone apps that apply design thinking principles to address healthcare challenges amid the continent’s familiar infrastructure shortcomings.
There is much in these examples that we can build on and learn from when it comes to developing successful business models that work in Africa.
Nigerian entrepreneur Bosun Tijani, arguing for the potential of these approaches in Africa, points out that to build a competitive, inclusive and sustainable continent we have to be thinking deeply about the system and the users as much as we think about the product or technology. Too many otherwise clever innovations have failed or stumbled in Africa because originators imagine that these technologies can and will work in isolation. He cites uber as an example. A sound technology that works in other parts of the world, but is struggling to gain a foothold in parts of Africa, because the ecosystem here by and large does not readily support the acquisition of good cars to join the system. “You can come up with the best innovation but if the system that needs to deliver that is not appropriate, you are in trouble,” he says.
As Tijani powerfully says, the Africa we desire is not going to happen by accident. Design thinking and human-centred design with their emphasis on empathy and collaboration alongside creativity and rigour, offer us as a tried-and-tested route forward.
Richard Perez is the founding director of the Hasso Plattner d-school AFRIKA at the University of Cape Town.
More insight into human-centered problem solving can be found at: https://dschoolafrika.org/learn-design-thinking/
First as an award-winning engineering student at UCT, now as a technopreneur and product manager in fintech, Ntsako Mgiba has discovered how design thinking principles can innovate business and tech in Africa.
How do you secure a home without reliable electricity, access to Wi-Fi, or an official and visible street address?
These questions have perplexed and frustrated big-name security companies eager to do business in South Africa’s township communities, limiting the development of this market segment. Not that the need doesn’t exist. Although statistics tell us that home break-ins are more common in white and affluent neighbourhoods, this demographic is also more likely to report them for insurance claims. Township households still suffer the same or worse fate – it’s just that these crimes largely go unreported in their neighbourhoods.
Aspiring technopreneur Ntsako Mgiba is all too familiar with this discrepancy. Some years ago, while living with his aunt in a township in Mpumalanga, thieves broke into the house while everyone was sleeping and stole laptops, smartphones, and other tech worth tens of thousands of rands. There was no alarm or security system. A few weeks later, as he resumed his studies in mechatronics at the University of Cape Town, his aunt informed him that burglars had returned for a second time.
Angry at the lack of protection afforded to his aunt, Mgiba and his flatmate, finance student Ntando Shezi, began experimenting with ideas for an alarm that would meet the needs of township residents. At the time they were participating in UCT Upstarts, a ‘social innovation challenge’ launched by the university in 2015 to support students to develop novel business ideas.
It didn’t take long to realise that any solution they proposed would have to go well beyond savvy tech. The series of pop-up classes and workshops they were attending as part of the Upstarts competition helped them understand that knowing their potential users was vital to the success of their innovation. This, Mgiba would learn, is one of the principles of design thinking, a human centric, problem-solving mindset and toolkit that is rapidly gaining ground around the world.
“Design thinking was kind of infused into the programme,” recalls Mgiba. “You had to speak to users, you had to validate concepts, we did rapid prototyping – these are all core design thinking concepts.”
The design-thinking principles were reinforced by the formal curriculum, which, today, has been incorporated across the engineering faculty with courses presented by the University’s Hasso Plattner School of Design Thinking, or d-school Afrika, one of only three such university-based d-schools in the world.
The design-thinking approach is so effective because it shows students how to break down complex, real-world problems and generate fresh solutions that address the needs and struggles of people. Those lessons came in handy in the development of Jonga, the home alarm – and company – that Mgiba and Shezi eventually established.
As Mgiba explained in an article in The Guardian, at the core Jonga’s development was understanding the reasons why his aunt’s household, like many others in townships, had to make do with only the basic home security measures – burglar bars, dogs, and lapsed alarm contracts – and then addressing each challenge with bespoke solutions. Jonga’s battery is good for six months on a single charge, so it works even when ESKOM doesn’t; the alarm is also wireless and easy to install, so no additional costs are incurred. It communicates wirelessly with a phone app. And, critically, its monthly charges are a fraction of those paid in the suburbs.
“As an engineer, you design things for people and for people to interact with,” says Mgiba. “It’s extremely important that you put the user or the person at the centre of anything that you design.”
This approach not only helped Mgiba and Shezi win the Upstarts competition, but it earned them top honours in the Santam Safety Ideas Challenge in 2017, saw them named the Africa winner in the Global Social Venture competition that same year, and took them to a top-five spot at the Diageo Social Tech Challenge.
From the beginning, looking at the big picture – a fundamental of design thinking – has been embedded in Jonga: jonga, after all, means “to look” in isiXhosa. It’s allowed them to imagine the growth of their business through a partnership with Coca-Cola and its Bizniz in a Box spaza shops, as well as further exploration of opportunities in South Africa’s wealthier suburbs.
Mgiba insists that design thinking is the perfect tool for aspiring African entrepreneurs, not only because of its emphasis on empathy with the end user, but because its rapid prototyping and adaptative tendencies make it fit-for-purpose for navigating the development and business challenges unique to Africa – a place where need is often overwhelming and variables fluctuate. Mgiba seeks to bring a design thinking focus into his job as product manager for local fintech start-up, Yoco, which is providing novel financial solutions to the country’s underserved small- and medium-sized enterprises, and even beyond this role to an informal community of over 200 young black founders he has brought together.
“Design thinking is a very common school of thought among us,” Mgiba says. “We may not all call it by that name, but definitely the principles and the tenets – user-centredness, prototyping, adapting – are being embraced among African entrepreneurs.”
And given that there are vast, under-served communities across the continent just waiting for the right product or service to meet their needs, the opportunities for African entrepreneurs that are prepared to think a little differently, seem endless to Mgiba.
“I think we are on the right track. This is a mindset that can help change how business and tech work for good in Africa.”
Richard Perez is the founding director of Africa’s first school dedicated to Design Thinking, the Hasso Plattner d-school Afrika at the University of Cape Town, which offers the Foundation Programme in Design Thinking.