Erin Worden (NYU Wagner) | Ipas | Kenya
In my first humanitarian job, I came across a disheartening statistic that the majority of humanitarian publications available online – including the fan-favorite report – essentially go unread. Only a bleak fraction of the reports is ever clicked, let alone read and used meaningfully.
Thankfully, Ipas is taking a different approach to self-managed abortion research.
Enter human-centered design (HCD) – an iterative, innovative problem-solving process that starts and ends with the people we are designing for, pregnant women and girls in humanitarian settings who are performing their abortions.
Preparing for an HCD workshop this fall is the focus of my work with Ipas. I am working alongside a network of top-notch regional and community-based organizations in Kenya to create a multi-day, contextualized HCD workshop. The workshop will involve activities, visuals, and conversations that will enable community participants, from refugee women to local NGO workers, to generate an output that uniquely solves abortion information and access challenges in Kakuma.
The output, whatever it may be, will be uniquely tailored to the specific challenge abortion seekers are facing. This is the great purpose and potential of HCD in sexual and reproductive health and rights programming.