Building Character Strengths with The Goodall Foundation

Organisation: The Goodall Foundation
Service: User Research, Content Co-Creation, Distribution and Impact Analysis

The Challenge:

Numerous studies have shown that character strengths like grit, growth mindset and resilience are as important as IQ and socioeconomic status to kids’ success in school and life. Top tier academic institutions like Riverdale Country School in New York City and KIPP schools across the U.S., have started to teach and assess students on key character strengths like curiosity, grit, and growth mindset, and just about every month there seems to be a new viral TED Talk or video proclaiming the importance of character for success in life.

Developing character strengths is especially important in low-resource environments where students are likely to face multiple factors that can impede their learning progress, such as poverty and low levels of parental education. So, while it is important for children to understand math and science concepts, they also need to develop the necessary character traits and mental skills that build resilience, perseverance, and ultimately contribute to success as an adult.

Simply put, Africa’s future is dependent on people who are not only book smart, but creative, hard-working problem solvers.

The Partnership

Luckily, there are organisations like the Goodall Foundation that are committed to empowering children across Tanzania to change their own lives for the better, through the development of character strengths. The Goodall Foundation is a U.K-based charity that provides individuals and organisations with the resources to deliver impactful, character-building projects that often have a technology focus. They have several projects in Tanzania, and were looking for a new and innovative way to teach as many children as possible about the importance of character strength in their life trajectory.

Ubongo worked with the Goodall Foundation to create four episodes which focus on enhancing four key character strengths: growth mindset, curiosity, purpose and grit – in addition to teaching kids math and science. These four character strengths were identified through a survey of key stakeholders in the education and employability sectors, as being the most important for kids and youth in Tanzania.

For these episodes, we conducted initial focus groups with kids to identify what they understood about the four chosen character strengths, and what words they used to express them in Kiswahili. We then developed storylines around these character strengths and read the stories to groups of kids to test their engagement, enthusiasm and understanding. The kids’ feedback helped inform the script and songwriting process, making sure we targeted existing gaps in their knowledge and of course catered to our viewers’ sense of humour!

We then produced episodes of Ubongo Kids about each of these character strengths, testing with our audience at each phase of production (story, audio, animatic and animation). These were broadcast on TV and radio to our audience, and post viewing focus groups were conducted to assess comprehension.

“Working with the Ubongo team has far exceeded our expectations. They have been incredibly collaborative in producing high-quality content that aligns with our goals and intensely focused on creating measurable impact on the lives of African children.” – Eugenie Teasley, CEO of The Goodall Foundation

The four Ubongo Kids episodes are available in Swahili on our YouTube channel:

• Episode on Grit
• Episode on Curiosity
• Episode on Living life with Purpose
• Episode on Growth Mindset

The Impact

In one of the post-viewing focus group sessions with students from Olkereyan Primary School in Northern Tanzania, we learned that one of the student’s favourite episode was about curiosity and the water cycle. In the episode, the characters, are left to water a neighbour’s garden, but after a while, the water disappears. One of the characters, a girl with albinism named Amani, starts to investigate the water mystery. By asking a lot of questions and conducting research she learns about the concept of evaporation, precipitation and the water cycle in general.

Video Link to Curiosity Episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doTmWYc-kVQ

From the episode, the student, Irene Moshi, learned that

“if you have a problem or something you don’t understand you have to be curious and ask people if they can help you out”!

While asking questions may seem like an obvious thing for children to do, unfortunately, this skill is not greatly encouraged in most Tanzanian homes and public schools.

In fact, Ubongo’s CEO Nisha Ligon says,

“Over the years we’ve done extensive formal and informal research with parents, and what has remained consistent is that Tanzanian parents value discipline and obedience over any other quality in their children. Too often, if a kid questions an adult, they are seen as disobedient and disrespectful. However, when creating the episodes with Goodall we surveyed a lot of employers in top companies across the country, and most of them stated that being able to ask questions and figure things out (basically curiosity) is a critical skill that they look for when hiring. So we created an episode that showed how curiosity can actually do good in a community, to help kids and parents embrace curiosity. Through the episode, we model polite ways of asking questions and strategies for kids to pursue their curiosity. We also have a special short at the end that shows parents how encouraging their kids to ask questions can set them up for success in life.x”

After watching the episode, Irene realised that being curious had actually helped her out a lot when she wanted to learn something new. “When I started this school, all the girls liked to jump rope at break time. I didn’t know how to do it. So I watched them and even asked my friend for advice on the technique. Now I can jump rope for 10 minutes without stopping! I realise that if I keep asking questions, I can learn many more things and become more intelligent!”

Although for most of the kids we did the focus groups with it was their first time watching the episodes, it was very clear that the learning objectives always kicked in and they were able to state what they learned from the episodes and relate that to their current situations at home and in school.

We are now conducting a large scale research project in partnership with Cambridge University and Uwezo to rigorously assess the episodes effects on academic outcomes and mindset change.