Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals requires novel pivotal solutions. But how can we innovate at scale while tailoring to the unique features of every community? Service design and experimental approaches offer a way forward.
The world has spent more than $3 trillion on development aid since the 1960s. These investments have achieved many successes, but challenges remain, with development “solutions” failing to really solve what ails the world. Clearly, the needs of people demand solutions that are innovative – but also feasible and scalable in terms of resources, capacities and the agendas of governments and development partners.
Esther Duflo and her colleagues at The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) who were awarded this year’s Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, broke new ground in the field of development economics by using randomized controlled trials to identify what works in terms of intervention design in specific settings.
To continue building on these accomplishments, we need tools that help us grasp why interventions work, and how they might be scaled up or replicated in new locations. The challenge is to find a way to understand socio-economic, cultural and political realities, including defining behaviors and social norms, and translate this complexity into effective development solutions.
Over the past five years together with a team of researchers at the Stockholm Environment Institute, I have been working on a way to integrate design thinking into development policy. I believe the results of our work could complement “the Duflo’s approach” and bridge national-level planning with granular local reality. This way, we can design well-fitted solutions and enable communities, implementers and donors to carry them out together side-by-side.
Service design is an approach for understanding people’s needs, motivations and behaviours as well as the context where they take place. It aims to create services or systems that meet the needs of the end-users. It has already been successfully applied to design public policy in Europe and North America, but hasn’t yet gained traction in international development. So, we made a toolkit specifically with development interventions in mind. ( Explore our conceptual framework in the World Development Journal.)
The idea is to co-define a problem together with key stakeholders, then map the context of the problem from the perspective of the recipients, and after that co-design a solution through rapid prototyping and testing.
We tested this approach in East Africa, in three completely different situations: to design a weather index insurance product in Uganda, to support the development of mango value chains in Kenya, and to promote wider use of clean cookstoves, also in Kenya.
These trials helped us to identify three ways service design can be used in development interventions.
By all means, these are small-scale trials, and they need a wider application to prove their worth. However, already at this early stage, the approach shows that service design can help us make sense of the complexity surrounding development interventions. It offers a way to work side by side with people who the development solutions are for. With this approach, we can deliver what international development projects aim for: solutions that work because they are context-specific yet scalable and because they are grounded in reality by design.
Design and development by Soapbox.