Lessons from the UNFPA Hack Lab
Female genital mutilation (FGM) is one of the most entrenched human rights violations affecting communities across Africa and beyond. Deeply rooted in cultural tradition, the practice causes lasting physical and psychological harm to the women and girls subjected to it. Ending it requires more than awareness — it requires solutions that come from within the communities themselves.
That belief is at the heart of how we approached the UNFPA FGM Hack Lab. In collaboration with UNFPA and other human-centered design facilitators, Made by People planned and ran a 5-day remote design thinking workshop that brought together innovators from eight African countries, united around a single mission: to develop practical, scalable solutions to educate, prevent, and ultimately end FGM.
"Ending FGM requires solutions that come from within the communities themselves. That's exactly what HCD makes possible."
"Ending FGM requires solutions that come from within the communities themselves. That's exactly what HCD makes possible."
Why Human-Centered Design for Social Change?
Design thinking for social impact in Africa isn't a new idea — but it remains one of the most underused tools in the development sector. Too often, solutions to complex community challenges are designed far from the people they're meant to serve, by people who don't share their context, language, or lived experience.
Human-centered design (HCD) flips that. It places the end-user — in this case, the women and girls most affected by FGM — at the centre of every design decision. Rather than arriving with a solution, HCD practitioners arrive with questions. What do people actually need? What barriers exist in their daily lives? What solutions would they trust, use, and sustain?
It's this approach that made the UNFPA FGM Hack Lab different from a conventional conference or ideation session. The goal wasn't just to generate ideas — it was to transform those ideas into implementable, scalable, practical solutions rooted in the realities of specific African communities.
Planning a Design Thinking Workshop Across Eight Countries.
Running a design thinking workshop across eight African countries, remotely, is not without its challenges. Made by People coordinated closely with UNFPA and fellow HCD facilitators to plan and execute a bootcamp that would work across different time zones, languages, connectivity conditions, and cultural contexts.
Some of the practical challenges we navigated included:
- Unreliable internet connectivity for participants in certain countries
- Coordinating across multiple time zones without disadvantaging any group
- Facilitating in a multilingual environment with participants who spoke different languages
- Technical issues with remote collaboration tools and server capacity
These weren't just logistical hurdles — they were a reminder of the very conditions that any solution designed at the Hack Lab would eventually need to work within. Designing for communities with limited connectivity or across language barriers isn't an edge case in Africa. It's the norm.
HCD in Practice: Shaping Ideas That Could Actually Work
Over five days, participants worked through the core stages of the design thinking process — empathy, ideation, prototyping, and testing — guided by HCD principles and supported by Made by People's facilitation team.
The emphasis throughout was on the end-user. Participants were consistently brought back to the question: what does the woman or girl affected by FGM actually need? What would she trust? What would work in her community, in her language, within her constraints?
This focus produced a remarkable range of ideas. Participants developed solutions including:
- Mobile applications for community education and reporting
- Web-based platforms for advocacy and awareness
- Community forums designed to open local dialogue
- Multimedia content including short films
- Physical resources including books and printed guides
What was striking was how the diversity of ideas reflected the diversity of the communities represented. There is no single solution to FGM — because there is no single community, culture, or context in which it occurs. HCD made space for that diversity, encouraging solutions that were specific, not generic.
"The diversity of ideas presented reflected the different cultures and contexts represented by participants. There is no single solution — because there is no single community"
The Outcomes: Real Solutions, Real Funding
The UNFPA FGM Hack Lab delivered results that went beyond the bootcamp itself. Two of the participating groups won grants of USD 50,000 each to bring their ideas into reality. Both were subsequently incubated in the UNFPA Innovation Lab, where they received additional support to build and test their solutions.
For Made by People, the Hack Lab was a demonstration of something we believe deeply: that UX design for social change isn't a niche discipline — it's one of the most important applications of design thinking we can practice. When you put people at the centre and give communities the tools to design their own solutions, you get outcomes that are more likely to be trusted, used, and sustained.
The FGM Hack Lab also reinforced the power of collaboration. MADE worked alongside other HCD facilitators, UNFPA staff, and innovators from across the continent — each bringing a different perspective. The result was richer, more contextually grounded, and more likely to create lasting change than any of us could have achieved alone.
What This Work Means for Us
Since our inception, Made by People has been committed to applying human-centered design for social impact across Africa. The UNFPA FGM Hack Lab is one of the projects we're most proud of — not because of our role in it, but because of what the participants themselves produced.
Community-based solutions, shaped by the people closest to the problem, are the foundation of sustainable change. Our role was to provide the framework, the facilitation, and the skills. The innovators — from eight countries, working across language and time zones and connectivity gaps — did the rest.
We believe every community has the potential to develop innovative solutions to its most pressing challenges. It's our role to support them, every step of the way.