Designers on a Mission - from Dadaab to Kabul to the World??
This entry has been selected as a finalist in the
Sport for a Better World competition.
Design culturally appropriate sports apparel for muslim refugee sporting girls that could be made in the community as a livelihood, skill building opportunity.
About You
Location
Project Street Address
Project City
Project Province/State
Project Postal/Zip Code
Project Country
Your idea
Sport
Other
Year the initative began (yyyy)
2005
Project URL (include HTTP://)
Positioning of your initiative on the mosaic diagram:
Which of these barriers is the primary focus of your work?
Stereotyping that excludes
Which of the principles is the primary focus of your work?
Include through sport
If you believe some other barrier or principle should be included in the mosaic, please describe it and how it would affect the positioning of your initiative in the mosaic:
This field has not been completed
Name Your Project
Designers on a Mission - from Dadaab to Kabul to the World??
Describe Your Idea
Design culturally appropriate sports apparel for muslim refugee sporting girls that could be made in the community as a livelihood, skill building opportunity.
Innovation
What is your signature innovation, your new idea, in one sentence?
Design culturally appropriate sports apparel for muslim refugee sporting girls that could be made in the community as a livelihood, skill building opportunity.
Describe your innovation. What makes your idea unique and different than others doing work in the field?
Our research of what was in the public domain and available commercially showed that muslim women (professionals and non professionals) struggle to find sports apparel that meets cultural requirements and is designed for sports performance. We applied our corporate assets (employee design, tailoring and materials skills/knowledge) and with insights from the community we created simple designs and patterns for sports apparel that could be made by the community (rather than being flown in); would perform for sports; would be fun; and would survive harsh environmental conditions of a refugee camp (temperature and wash conditions).
What are the existing barriers, the biggest problem, your innovation is hoping to address/change?
The lack of simple, easy, cost effective, available solutions/tools to the barrier that muslim women and girls can face just getting onto the playing field. Do not underestimate how big this barrier is. How important and fundamental it is in these communities for sports clothing that at all times provides (and is seen as providing) appropriate cover and adherance to important cultural protocols that will otherwise prevent women and girls from even starting.
Delivery Model: How do you implement your innovation and apply it to the challenge/problem you are addressing?
After the Mission we created a packet of patterns and simple "How to"" Instructions, Guidelines and Recommendations for any community to make and adapt these uniforms to their circumstances. There is also a small contract (rembember this is a a community donation and not a money making acitivity for Nike) and we do not want for these sports apparel designs or made apparel to be sold and/or for any Nike branding to be put on them. Other than that this packet is available and ready to scale up and help to address this real barrier to muslim women and girls participating in sports. It probably needs some reworking to make it more professional but the basics are there.
How do you plan to grow your innovation?
The innovation itself is simple and needs to be kept that way. What needs to grow is availability/accessibility of the intellectual capital and tools that were created following the Mission so that many and not the few can access and take advantage - create/make their own appropriate sports apparel for muslim women and girls. One way to do that could be via a partnership. This can be as simple as you want it to be.
Impact
Provide one sentence describing your impact/intended impact.
This fun, different and culturally appropriate and community co-designed and accepted sports apparel enables excluded refugee girls to participate joyfully, with great benefit in sports.
What impact has your innovation had to date/or what is your intended impact? Exactly who are the beneficiaries?
Gives girls something fun, different to sport in that is designed for sports performance. They loved it. The work to make the sports apparel for these girls continued. We provided the cash to buy sufficient material to provide one set for each sporting girl for one year. Then in November 2005 there were devastating floods in Dadaab life was threatened and Together for Girls was put on hold. Now the Together for Girls project is about to be funded by the Nike Foundation via ninemillion.org. So the girls of Dadaab are again about to be able to access sports and its benefits.
How many people have you served directly?
Girls in Together for Girls: 521 (2004-2005)
Tailors/Seamstresses - capacity built: 40 (at a guess!)
How many people have you served indirectly?
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Please list any other measures reflective of the impact of your innovation?
Contributed to the fact that Together for Girls (as the umbrella education programme in which sports will happen) now has significant funding from Nike Foundation. Of which provision of this sports apparel for girls must be an integral part.
What are the main barriers to creating or achieving your impact?
Time and money to create a better package of Instructions and Tools and Advice that can be mass produced and made available to anyone that wants it - globally. With more thought and strategic focus we could also potentially find ways to engage other employees to go UNHCR refugee camps to help build capacity to cut and sew the sports apparel designs. For this piece the barrier is money and management support. Digital strategies and storytelling.
This Entry is about (Issues)
Sustainability
How is your initiative financed (or how do you expect your initiative will be financed)?
This field has not been completed
If known, provide information on your finances and organization.
This field has not been completed
What is the potential demand for your innovation?
Huge. Any and all muslim communities around the world where women and girls are not able to participate in sports and can not therefore access the life skills building that sports offers and therefore may remain excluded. This is easy to do and should be made available and accessible.
What are the main barriers to financial sustainability?
1. The type of material needed to make the sports apparel is not easy to access in Dadaab (and some other communities) and is expensive.
2. The environmental conditions are so harsh that sports apparel continually need to be made for new girls to participate in sports and to replace worn outfits.
3. Building the tailoring skills in the community - creating the market and enhancing livelihoods - challenging
4. Something for the boys - in this forgotten community
The Story
What is the origin of this innovation? Tell us your story.
October 2004. A trip. To the refugee camps in Dadaab (North East Kenya). To see first hand how the Nike UNHCR partnership and programme ''Together for Girls'' was succeeding in using sports as a tool to address barriers that refugee girls face in enrolling and STAYING in school. Imagine: overbearing 40 degree heat, red dust and not much else except (very importantly) homes to nearly 100k, mostly Somalian, refugees - many of whom have been there for nearly 15 years. Imagine: seeing refugee girls playing sports (volleyball) against all odds and in their conservative (very) daily/school clothing. Their determination and passion for playing overcoming many barriers. Imagine: thinking ''wouldn't it be great to bring Nike design employees here to work with the community to design and make their own appropriate sports apparel for them to play in''. Take those imagined things and make them reality. That is what we did. Excite and engage our apparel design and development function to run a competition to find 4 employees with the skills to design for and with this community. After a lot of pre-work and research we arrived in Dadaab on MISSION with 3 prototypes. After talking to the girls (alone) to get their feedback and then meeting with the community an amended design was chosen. We then sat in a sewing centre and made the new uniforms for 2 hot and exhilarating days!
Please provide a personal bio. Note this may be used in Changemakers marketing material.
An environmental scientist by education and an environmental lawyer by profession I moved to Nike in the Netherlands in July 1996. I established and drove the creation of the systems for compliance with environmental laws for products, packaging and operations in the European region. Now I manage strategies for employee inspiration and engagement in community projects (by skill transfer) and community partnerships in Northern Europe.
How did you hear about this contest and what is your main incentive to participate? (this is confidential)
Nike sponsored. This entry is for the Nike Employee Challenge
Affiliation (please list all that apply)
This field has not been completed
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| FT Jan 26.pdf | 401.3 KB |
| Final Agreed Design Drawing.pdf | 253.95 KB |
| muslimicon.jpg | 2.71 KB |
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Comments
Hi Annie,
As you know, I am a huge fan of this initiative. It strikes me that this could be adapted or adopted by many of the other projects serving women living in communities where physical modesty may pose a constraint to their participation in sport. I also think there is an opportunity to strengthen this model so that their is a more sustained contribution of raw materials to accompany the newly acquired skills of pattern making/ sewing/ and uniform creation so that this can provide more than just an opportunity to play in comfortable attire, but also sustainable livelihoods? Can you comment on whether you think there would be an opportunity to involve Nike's manufacturing partners or others to donate materials on a more sustained basis? Also, I wonder if there is a way to scale the "skills transfer" through instructional videos and downloadable patterns?
Thanks!
Z
I also believe this is a fantastic initiative which we can still learn from and also we can strengthen. I definetely think there is a room for our manfacturing partners to be a part of this modal. We just need to find more effective ways of reaching them and sharing our initiatives.
Dear Annie,
Thanks so much for your submission to Changemakers. It is a novel concept – its core strategy is granting easier access to sports apparel, which is a key barrier to participation in sports in many Arab countries for women. We are encouraged by your strong passion for the concept and good understanding and discussion of your target audience’s needs.
As a new social entrepreneur, it often helps clarify your purpose when you walk though the exercise of building a theory of change and logic model. If you are interested, we just recently posted a general piece on the contest criteria – innovation, scale, and impact – that might be helpful to you. (see http://www.changemakers.net/en-us/node/729#comment-2686.) As we discussed your model, you could even take the model to the next level and allow woman to create their own social enterprises to commercially produce the apparel within their communities. This would give you incremental social outcomes – including independence and financial security. There are quite a few examples of this being done in the Arab countries.
You might also want to consider looking into partnerships that will reduce the costs (i.e. you mentioned that material was expensive) for the women as well as help you find the women who would be interested in “investing” in this social enterprise. You then could just develop low-cost kits – the pattern, the how-to on starting a local social enterprise, and start-up material – to give out to these organizations.
If you have specific questions on this posting, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
Sincerely,
Paul Bloom
Senior Research Scholar of Social Entrepreneurship and Marketing
Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship
Duke University – Fuqua School of Business
Suzanne Steffens
CASE Scholar
MBA Student, Class of 2008
Duke University – Fuqua School of Business
Duke University's Fuqua School of Business
HI Suzanne and Paul
These are all great ideas and thanks. My real challenge is having the time to actually follow up and BE a social entrepreneur... do you have any students at Duke who might be passionat enoug to help?
I absolutely think the model should include a way for women to build their own enterprises so we could develop a broader package of advice (not just the patterns and how to) about how to build a business... it would be difficult to do that in Dadaab where we started this but Dadaab is extreme circumstances but not in many other parts of the world. Key to that would be targetting women in communities where we know there is sports for muslim women going on... they need to have a market to be successful.
Anyway... all food for thought!
annie
HI Suzanne and Paul
These are all great ideas and thanks. My real challenge is having the time to actually follow up and BE a social entrepreneur... do you have any students at Duke who might be passionat enoug to help?
I absolutely think the model should include a way for women to build their own enterprises so we could develop a broader package of advice (not just the patterns and how to) about how to build a business... it would be difficult to do that in Dadaab where we started this but Dadaab is extreme circumstances but not in many other parts of the world. Key to that would be targetting women in communities where we know there is sports for muslim women going on... they need to have a market to be successful.
Anyway... all food for thought!
annie
Hi Annie
I think your initiative is nice and useful and Im glad that NIKE is doing it.
Which I don't understand is the reason why NIKE as a company is competing for a reward when they are not a charity organization, but a huge multinational with enough resources to finance this thing.
More surprising even to see that NIKE sponsor this event, meaning giving money and that could go back to them???
Anyway, good luck with your initiative, I just think is a pitty to not give the possibility to many fantastic, small and growing projects that do need the reward to keep on improving.
cheers
Mario
Hi Mario,
Thanks for your feedback. As you will see from my profile, I am part of the social innovation/CR team at Nike, so I thought I might be able to add a bit of history (as well as offer my own perspective on Annie's entry and success in reaching the final round. But first, I wanted to also clarify that Mark Parker - our CEO and also a judge on the competition - recused himself from the deliberation around this entry, so the fact that Annie made it this far was a vote a confidence from the other judges. Okay, so process aside, I hear what you are saying about the prize money and it is probably true that someone from Nike probably needs the funds less than some of the more cash strapped NGOs, so perhaps this is something for us to think about, but I do think that the recognition is important because even those of us that see ourselves as social "intrapreneurs" working from within the bounds of a company need visibility to mobilize support to push this type of work forward.
Part of the rationale that our team had in opening this competition to Nike employees (and to be honest, I hope next year many more will enter) is because it is a way to get social issues more deeply embedded within our company. If more Nike employees start thinking about how to integrate social considerations into their work, we could transform the business model of our entire company, not to mention perhaps mobilize the millions of individuals who purchase our products.
But your comments definitely gives us food for thought. Perhaps next time we set aside a slot for a Nike employee finalists and retain 3 winner slots for the rest of the community, but we would want to retain full access to the dialogue and competitive process to ensure that the best idea wins!
running out of words so will continue in another post....
Ziba
So, my final comment is that I would love your thoughts (and those of other members of the "changemaker community") because we are truly committed to the principles of transparency and open-source solutions - which is what the changemakers platform! So, let us know and we will continue the dialogue and I am sure come up with a better solution together.
Cheers,
Ziba
Mario
You are so very right. If this project were to be voted in as one of the 3 prizewinners, we would absolutely not take the money (and I would hope it could go to one of the ''small and growing'' projects you mention), since it is not about the money.
Right now, for whatever reason, right or wrong, the ''package'' that we created after Designers on a Mission sits in a filing cabinet in my office. The package captures the key intellectual capital from the project and I want Nike to share it. I am simply trying to find a way to set it free (from my filing cabinet) to address one of the key barriers that muslim women and girls face may face in participating in sports. Regardless of winning prizes (which is not the issue - its not about me or Nike) what I am really hoping via this process is to find someone who can professionalise the package (it is pretty basic at the moment) so that we can just send it out (ideally for free) to sporting muslim women and their communities.
Are you the person to do that or do you know someone that is? Let me know!
Annie
The beauty of social innovation in the new world of open source that is happening here in this competition is that there should be NO barriers to entry – and I mean none – zero - zip, including being an employee of the company who sponsors the competition. The prize money is minimal $5000 USD and does not go to the individual but to creating a sustainable way to moving the best ideas forward. AND the point is to get great ideas populated on the site so they can be taken to scale. It’s all about social innovation and mobilizing tribes, and harnessing the brilliance of crowds in the sport for a better world space NOT about winning the competition.
The BEST solutions to barriers will without doubt happen in the space between the sectors NOT in one particular sector. The point of this competition is to mobilize folks to vote for the programs they believe can have the most lasting and sustainable impact on an issue they care about. Those of us who deeply care about a huge barrier for women being appropriate sports apparel are thrilled to see an idea like this have the opportunity to get global exposure. … to be sustainable, no doubt this project needs to be a part of a cross-sector partnership. So, let’s brainstorm!
In the new world order – open source and expanding the boundaries of engagement are true north as doing good cannot be the privileged of the academics and NGO’s. The solutions need to come from all sectors. What a shame if Annie and other brilliant Nike employees were excluded from posting entries because they happen to work for the company who sponsors the competition! the judging process has to be above that type of bias - and it is!
The process of competitive collaboration is at its best when it is not framed in limitations, but in possibilities. Let the best ideas win and multiply!
MB
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