Data Edutainment for Girls’ Economic Empowerment

Organisation: Data for Local Impact (DLi)
Service: User Research, Content Co-Creation, Distribution, Impact Evaluation

The Challenge

The challenge from Data for Local Impact (DLi) was to increase adolescent girls’ economic empowerment by giving them access to data about financial management and employability, and to engage them in generating more relevant data on these topics.

The Data for Local Impact (DLi) innovation challenge supports local Tanzanian innovators and entrepreneurs to design solutions for problems associated with data gaps and ineffective use of data to address issues around HIV/AIDS, health, gender and economic growth.

Sex-ed and contraception aren’t the only interventions need to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS. Economic empowerment of adolescent girls and young women is correlated to decreased infection rates of HIV/AIDS. Early intervention to help girls become financially literate and plan for their future can reduce their vulnerability to infection, and give them more control over their lives and family planning.

The Partnership

Ubongo received funding from DLi to generate and share data through our Ubongo Kids TV program that could increase girls’ economic empowerment. We were already working with SPRING to create financial literacy episodes of Ubongo Kids around saving, earning and budgeting, and the partnership with DLi allowed us to add onto this with a series of interactive SMS shorts about finances and employability, specifically targeted towards Tanzanian adolescent girls.

Working from insights gained through focus groups about hopes, dreams and finances we had conducted with adolescent girls in urban Mwanza and rural Shinyanga, we crafted a series of multiple choice and open-ended questions to ask our audience. The first questions were presented during broadcasts of Ubongo Kids in Tanzania, and viewers were encouraged to answer via SMS.

After the first set of questions were answered, we developed fun, girl-led shorts to present the data that had been collected, along with other relevant data from reliable sources. For example, we surveyed viewers on what careers they are most interested in. We took the thousands of answers received via SMS and created animated infographics, which were then presented by our adolescent girl hosts in a fun and engaging conversation. Our hosts presented what careers most viewers wanted to pursue, and then they also presented information from the Tanzanian government on jobs in high demand by the market… many of which may be unfamiliar and yet interesting to adolescents. To “dig deeper” the hosts hit the streets to interview other adolescents on why they’re interested in particular careers, and visit professionals in less well known job positions, like a biomedical research scientist. At the end of the short, viewers were prompted to answer a follow on question, such as, “Which of the following skills do you think is most important for you to get a job? a. Creativity, b. Academic Knowledge, c. Problem Solving, d. Communication Skills” and once data was collected from that question, a new short would be produced, presenting what was learned, and then prompting for the next question.

The Results

In total, 6 shorts were produced and 9 questions are going to be asked throughout the course of the project, with a total of 3500 valid responses so far. We are excited to see the high engagement around these shorts, but we are still in progress on the evaluation of outcomes.

We are planning a scale-up of the project with the same, iterative data gathering and sharing process integrated into full episodes of Ubongo Kids.