July 2021 Newsletter — Innovation for recovery and resilience
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It is 2021 and we have stepped into the second year of a pandemic that has changed everything we previously considered conventional. As you read this, COVID-19 continues to take its toll on lives and livelihoods around the world and Bangladesh has entered into a new round of lockdowns as caseloads rise.
In these difficult times, BRAC continues to adapt and support communities through our work - made possible through the unwavering commitment of our colleagues on the ground and behind the scenes, as well as the critical contributions from our development partners.
This July, Social Innovation Lab is taking a step back to think of how we have adapted our methods (just as the rest of the world has), to continue to frugally innovate at scale to solve some of our most wicked problems.
We are delving deeper into systems and solutions that can help us bridge gaps in gender equity, access to information and quality education, digital literacy, financial inclusion, and skills. We are taking lean and evidence-based approaches to design, test and implement our interventions while keeping sustainability in mind. We are making ideas tangible quickly, based on human-centred and inclusive design principles.
SIL continues to support the world’s largest development organisation to be an innovating organisation that identifies problems regardless of sector and drives solutions holistically.
Read on to find out more about our innovative experimentation so far in 2021!
Tanjina Anis
Programme Manager, Social Innovation Lab, BRAC
Future-proofing Jobs in the RMG Sector
Bangladesh’s apparel industry has been a key growth driver of its economy for the past few decades. Other than being the country’s economic flagship, the industry has been a symbol of women empowerment all around the world. As the fourth industrial revolution is fast approaching these jobs are getting automated by machines that previously lacked versatility and dexterity to handle soft materials.
How can we leverage technology and innovation to safeguard women garment workers against threats of job loss due to automation? The STITCH for RMG project, funded by H&M Foundation, aims to answer this question.
As part of this initiative, the recently hosted STITCH for RMG Global Innovation Conference brought together industry stakeholders from around the world in a dialogue to future-proof the jobs of women garment workers. Key recommendations included upskilling the women workers, creating an enabling work environment, and increasing the overall competitiveness of the industry.
This was also BRAC’s first fully virtual conference where we ensured partner engagement, collaboration and codesign were everpresent despite the physical distance.
The outcomes from the conference will shape the themes of the STITCH for RMG Global Innovation Challenge. Through the challenge, we will embark on a search for scalable, equitable and implementable innovations that can facilitate the social and technological empowerment of women garment workers. The top six innovations will be awarded grants and incubation support.
Establishing Sustainable Hand Hygiene Practices During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Since May 2020, we have partnered with the Behavioural Insights Team and BRAC Institute of Governance and Development to take a behaviourally informed approach to designing, pre-testing, and implementing interventions to improve hygiene habits, whilst generating crucial evidence on what works best in context. Beyond simply joining the global pandemic response, using behaviourally-formed methods ensured we were designing for the sustainability of healthy hygiene practices throughout the population.
In addition, we partnered with Jeeon and HappyTap, to use channels of local pharmacists as hygiene ambassadors and to increase accessibility to hygiene products on a household level respectively, to encourage communities to adopt improved hygiene habits. Together with various partners, we conducted a nationally representative vaccine perceptions survey, conducted interviews with households across our intervention areas, and even tested multiple nudges at pharmacies to understand ways to make the recommended habits stick!
Read more about what we learned from testing nudges (e.g. mirrors on stations, soap distribution nearby, etc) and what it takes to establish handwashing stations in public locations, along with content and games to share simple, relevant hygiene messaging that encourages people to adopt and retain habits. Up next we will be fortifying our interventions to enable people to retain recommended habits for the long term, and sharing the evidence we have generated via our work.
P.S. Join us for the final session of HBCC's Community of Practice for Innovations series on "How to Design Effective Communications During a Crisis" 28 July 2021 at 12 PM Bangladesh time. Please contact nourin.r@brac.net for further details.
Designing for Her Power (remotely)
How might we encourage women to learn, explore and use mobile money more meaningfully? As mobile wallet transfers by institutions and individuals spiked during the pandemic, building better digital literacy amongst women in low-resourced communities became imperative to ensure equitable financial inclusion. After hundreds of client interviews with the BRAC Integrated Development Programme, we found that women privately prepare for times of crisis through secret savings. A rainy day fund she builds and owns. Our goal became to use that idea to drive innovation in digital learning!
We partnered with IDEO.org and bKash to design an incentivised digital savings programme for women living in the remote wetlands of Habiganj that could also be an educational experience. Working in the middle of a pandemic changed how we perceived sustainability. We needed to design a model that could run effectively without us going out to the field and communicate effectively even to those who cannot read.
After 400+ hours of designing, testing and iterating, BRAC Shakti will pilot with 5,000 women this Fall, with the aim to create a comfortable environment (with peer-based nudges and support) in which a community can learn and succeed together. To add more gamification and behavioural insights into the mix, we are working with Busara to evaluate the effectiveness of our model.
There is more. We think BRAC Shakti could become the win-win we were looking for. For BRAC and our mobile finance providers, the platform can be a sandbox for testing new digital financial services and using this as a starter pack for other digital services across our programmes.
Empowering the Change Agents: A Digital Learning Platform for Remote Teacher Training
COVID-19 has changed education forever. Schools have shut down globally and children are out of their classrooms for more than a year now. Many education institutes have accelerated the digitisation of classrooms and training systems. However, the digitally enabled world and the self-based learning platforms are not equal - lack of access to devices, the internet, and low technology literacy remains an impediment for the teachers or students living in peri-urban and rural areas in developing countries.
We designed the Onneshon (a Bengali word that means “in pursuit of knowledge”) rapid prototype project in partnership with BRAC Education Programme with an aim to design a one-stop digital learning platform for teachers. 71 teachers, across 8 districts of Bangladesh participated to acquire 21st-century teaching skills with the convenience of learning from home.
The teachers were divided into seven mentorship groups and received extensive support in completing the two-month-long training on a digital platform. The ‘human touch’ model of the prototype helped teachers in bridging the gap of tech-literacy skills and also accessing quality professional development training through self-paced digital content. Remarkably, the teacher who stood first in the overall assessment of this prototype programme had never used a smartphone before attending Onneshon. Thus, the success made us believe that inequalities can be strongly encountered with implementing contextualised interventions.
Blended learning is set to become the norm and teachers require up-skilling on how to deliver it effectively. Despite the challenges, the COVID-19 pandemic provided us with a unique opportunity to upskill our teachers before the school opens. Continuous training will ensure that the system is better prepared and resilient to deal with future unanticipated shocks.
Technology for Good
At SIL, we are working relentlessly to strengthen local capacity in tech innovations and also democratise technology so that it serves the hardest to reach. The need for both was highlighted by the pandemic. This work is supported by BRAC Technology and Integrated Development Programme, and our funding partners Frontier Technology Livestreaming and Internet Society Foundation.
We are creating a network of local manufacturers across Bangladesh that can facilitate BRAC to explore experimental product designs, assess ground demands and test feasibility and efficiency so that when the need strikes, we are able to respond quickly. We are also upskilling and resourcing the makerspace ecosystem to enable them for “Humanitarian Making” i.e. leveraging universities, SMEs, and global maker knowledge to build solutions and entrepreneurship that can strengthen our response to communities affected by humanitarian, public health or climate change disasters.
In Bangladesh’s wetlands where communities are only accessible by boats, we are envisioning a digital ecosystem of services that will democratise access to healthcare, human rights and legal aid support, and digital literacy for financial inclusion. To do this, Digital Upazila Obhijaan (DUO) will leverage existing digital service points such as the government-run Union Digital Centres and BRAC IDP branch offices to create hubs and spokes for low-cost access. Increasing technology literacy will be at the upfront of the DUO initiative.
To help us experiment with next-gen technologies in social enterprises and the humanitarian and development sectors at large, as the newest Ethereum Foundation Fellow SIL’s Kuldeep Aryal is developing a blockchain and crypto strategy for BRAC. Kuldeep joined SIL as our Social Innovation Fellow in 2019 and is now leading our initiatives in technology for development.
What are we reading?
Our programmes continue to search for new opportunities to foster women’s financial inclusion. Read how our Health programme digitised payments for over 50,000 female community health workers and volunteers, and what this could mean for both health system strengthening and digital financial inclusion!
This article by Matthew Kertman on the importance of decolonising development language and communications to break problematic power relations in the sector.
Keep an eye on our Medium publication and The Good Feed for more stories in frugal innovation.
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