Fighting COVID and Fostering Innovation by Design in Malawi
MSU Hub for Innovation in Learning and Technology has the opportunity to work with many partners at Michigan State University and abroad. We are excited to highlight the work of the MSU Innovation Scholars Program (ISP) and their design-centered collaboration with the Malawi Institute of Science and Technology.
MSU strives to be an institution that works to improve the quality of life for people at home and around the world. COVID-19 has raged around the world and decreased the quality of life for many people, especially on the continent of Africa. Because of MSU’s heritage in working alongside our African partners to address complex problem, MSU was in the right place and right time to help the Malawi University of Science and Technology (MUST) lead Malawi in their fight against COVID via research-based innovations.
“It was an opportunity for MUST to partner with a globally recognized university, and to work with international experts. It has been a very big opportunity, not only for MUST, but at a country level,” says David Mkwambisi, Director of the Innovation Garage at MUST.
MUST is a new institution of higher learning, recently graduating its first cohort. However, this young institution quickly responded to the COVID crisis and created a novel mobile solar powered hand sanitation station and COVID-19 tracking app. The story of how MUST created these innovations begins back in Oct 2018 with the launch of USAID $1 Innovation Scholars led by Michigan State University and the Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources (LUANAR).
Fighting COVID-19 By Design
MUST, LUANAR and MSU did not start working together to fight a global pandemic. We started working together because of a dedication to see faculty at Malawian Universities be drivers of economic growth in Malawi. Being a driver of economic growth is in the DNA at MSU because past leadership and faculty made decisions that moved MSU into that role.
The Innovation Scholars Program is helping write innovation into the DNA of Malawi universities by helping faculty work to create research-based innovation that are unique to Malawi. At the same time, help university leadership make decisions that support a culture where innovation is normal.
“It is an opportunity because it is capacitating our young researchers who maybe don’t have a lot of experience in carrying out clearly defined research innovations,” says Mkwambisi. “It is also giving an opportunity at the university level to clearly define the research innovations, the capacity building innovations. It has also allowed us in Malawi to make sure that our training programs, our teaching innovations, our research innovations, are embracing international practice.”
MSU’s Global Center for Food Systems Innovation and personnel from the MSU Hub for Innovation in Learning and Technology joined forces to design the ISP program in Malawi. The ISP has the singular focus of teaching individuals how to combine human centered design with science to produce innovations that work for people.
“One of the mantras of our program is: ‘Innovation is a process, not a product. And if it’s a process, we can teach it,’” says Kurt Richer, deputy director of MSU’s Global Center for Food Systems Innovation (GCFSI). Richter is also the director of the ISP. “So that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to teach innovation through a series of experience-based activities where participants use a small amount of money to go solve a problem, using human-centered design as the framework. That framework of human-centered design supports the science they do as a scholar.”
An emphasis on incorporating end-users into the design process and sourcing their feedback as prototypes are developed is what differentiates human-centered design from a traditional, siloed design process.
The “human-centered” aspect is an essential component of the Innovation Garage’s philosophy, according to Mkwambisi. He wants to empower Malawians to co-design solutions to Malawian problems and engage local communities in the innovation process.
“In the landscape outside the university, the human centered design approach is allowing scientists to interact with stakeholders, with farmers, and people in the private sector. That also allows our stakeholders to understand the lifestyle within the university,” says Mkwambisi.
Creating a Culture of Innovation
“We are aiming at advancing a Community Innovations Program, working with District Councils to identify innovations within communities that can be brought to the Garage for mentorship, even in local languages, until products are developed for their intended use and job creation,” says Mkwambisi. “We want to groom talent by engaging with secondary schools through the Junior Talent and Innovation Program. This will bring students that have innovations to capacitate them until their ideas are developed into products that can be commercialized.”
This emphasis on incorporating end-users into the design process and sourcing their feedback as prototypes are developed is what differentiates human-centered design from a traditional, siloed design process unfolding at a remove from its ultimate users. This is one reason Richter is passionate about using human-centered design to tackle problems in communities with nuanced conditions that are hard for outsiders to fully grasp: this form of innovation minimizes assumptions and maximizes integrating local expertise.
Richter illustrates this by tweaking the familiar proverb about teaching a man to fish and feeding him for a lifetime, in lieu of simply providing him a single fish. “The assumption behind that axiom is that an outsider comes in and ‘teaches,’ giving knowledge the teacher has to the student and thus solving the student’s problem. You don’t really build their capacity to create their own solution,” says Richter. “We feel the best path forward for people who face development problems is for the people with the development problem have a voice in determining what the solution should be. The ISP works faculty to build their skills to use scientific knowledge to solve and build their confidence that they can be drivers for economic growth in their own country.”
Malawian Innovation
“As a progressive public university, the Malawi University of Science and Technology realizes that for it to be of relevance to the nation, it has to be in the forefront of contributing solutions for for national challenges,” says Professor Address Malata, vice chancellor of MUST. “Through research, innovation and technology, we want to contribute towards national socioeconomic conversation and policy development. The ISP is the first project that taught us how to be innovative and gave MUST the confidence to rapidly produce COVID-19 innovations.”
The culture of design at the Innovation Garage is already paying unique dividends. Two innovations have distinguished themselves through utility in the fight against COVID-19: a mobile hand-washing station and a COVID-19 tracking app. Both were invented through a collaborative process that included faculty and students at MUST, Mkwambisi, and guidance from the GCFSI ISP program.
Solar-powered Sanitation
Malawians understand that frequent handwashing is one of the best ways to fight the coronavirus. However, a scarcity of clean running water and hands-free mechanisms in the country means Malawians are fighting COVID-19 at a terrible disadvantage. The Innovation Garage put out a call for innovations to fight COVID-19.
According to Richter, many early innovators stumble by relying on complex processes and technology for their inventions. Coaching innovators into a practical, locally-focused mindset is central to the ISP approach. This is why Richter and Mkwambisi were delighted to see the proposal from Malawian architect Charles Makamo.
“I got a message from David that looked like it was drawn on a napkin,” says Richter. “It’s a schematic of a bucket, with a tap and faucet that would allow people to wash their hands without touching it.”
Makamo worked in concert with the Innovation Garage to build a prototype. “We coached the inventor on design thinking, and coached him through the iterations,” says Richter. “It went from being a scrap paper drawing to a functional machine in about two weeks. Pretty soon, he had a solar-powered hand washing machine that uses cheap Chinese hand-washing sensors widely available in Malawi. The UN then bought forty or fifty of them and put them all over Malawi.”
COVID-19 Tracking App
As director of the Innovation Garage, Mkwambisi has students interested in innovation come to him with ideas often. He matched some of these students with a MUST ISP scholar, and together, the team built a COVID-19 tracking application. The app allows health officials to track disease hotspots, trace cases, and generate data.
“Several interventions had been disseminated by the Malawian Government to combat COVID-19, but decision-makers did not know exactly where the outbreaks were occurring,” says Emmanual Chinkaka, a member of the student design team behind the app. “We felt it was necessary to develop an integrated platform to trace cases and locate hotspots so decision-makers knew where best to focus their efforts.”
According to Richter, it was important to the team not to create a dead-end data set — a surprisingly common pitfall in early innovation. They wanted to be sure the data they collected was properly utilized and tied in with larger data sets in Malawi. The team found a powerful partner: their efforts were noticed by the Malawian Ministry of Health, who has integrated the student team’s app data into their own efforts.
“Ultimately, MUST had to create new intellectual property procedures and licensing agreements that they then used to license these innovations in the Malawi marketplace,” says Richter. The journey from concept to new IP in such a short time is nearly miraculous in the design world. Richter stresses that this is what’s possible when one develops a holistic culture of innovation in places where people have a desire to be change agents and get the support they need.
Building Capacity
The process at the heart of a new university, and especially in an innovation space like the Innovation Garage, is known as “capacity building” — a formalized process for deepening and widening the work of which those institutions are capable.
“In short, capacity development is strengthening people and organizational abilities to do their missions more robustly,” says John Bonnell. Bonnell is a capacity development specialist at MSU who has been involved from the MUST ISP project from its genesis. His specialty is capacity development in academic workspaces.
Bonnell sees some of MUST’s successes as the result of a slow paradigm shift in terms of how institutions like MSU support their analogues in developing communities. It’s a shift with roots in human-centered design.
“There’s a general trend from donor organizations, realizing that for sustained bang-for-the-buck, developing people who can carry on an initiative is really critical. It’s moving away from a more archaic form of support, where we’re just going to sit people in seats and dump some knowledge into them.”
For specialists like Bonnell, tapping the strengths people already have and drawing on the extant expertise of locals is crucial. “Their local knowledge is going to be way better than ours. We want our collaborators to have agency. We really try to take that approach in the Innovation Scholars Program. I think that’s one reason for its success, that very contextualized approach,” he says.
“Don’t underestimate the ingenuity and entrepreneurship of underutilized youth,” says Richter. “You could say that about Africa generally. This project shows that some of these students in Malawi are incredibly smart and driven, but they lack resources and access to opportunities. Part of what we’re doing with the ISP is helping make MUST a place that has the capacity to create opportunities for students. You don’t just create something like what we have with the entrepreneurship program at MSU overnight.”
A Future of Collaboration
Richter and Bonnell are excited about the future of the MUST ISP project, especially as it begins to produce valuable innovations gaining national notoriety and fighting the pandemic.
Their sentiments are shared by Vice Chancellor Malata.
“As a progressive public university, the Malawi University of Science and Technology realizes that for it to be of relevance to the nation, it has to be in the forefront of contributing towards solution finding for national challenges,” says Malata. “Through research, innovation and technology, we want to contribute towards national socioeconomic conversation and policy development. The ISP is the first project that taught us how to be innovative and gave MUST the confidence to rapidly produce COVID-19 innovations.”
