Women's leadership audio toolkit for rural communities
Example: Walk us through a specific example(s) of how this solution makes a difference; include its primary activities.
Marketplace: Who else is addressing the problem outlined here? How does the proposed project differ from these approaches?
Founding Story
Aaron
I work for the Center for Creative Leadership in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia where we have created a social sector innovation hub. Our work centers around developing leaders at the grassroots level through innovative approaches in mentoring, training, coaching, and low tech solutions. I've lived in Ethiopia for the last 7 years, working in humanitarian relief efforts and most recently taking those skills into developing better leadership at the community level to improve projects and organizational impact. I'm married to a beautiful and wonderful woman named Zayid, have a big dog, and love to ride my motorcycle into remote parts of the country.
I like to challenge assumptions, challenge our organization to stretch themselves into new and potentially risky endeavors, and challenge others around me to break their mental models. The ability to challenge the status quo, coupled with keen business acumen and a deep understanding of cultural context has enabled me to thrive as an intrapreneur at CCL.
, NC, Greensboro
, Addis Ababa
Oromiya Region, Gambella Region
Education
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Start-Up (a pilot that has just begun operating)
Traditionally, leadership development only occurs at the highest points of organizational and economic pyramids. This flips the model upside down making leadership development affordable, scalable, and accessible. It's about unlocking human potential, but doing it through a low-cost model.
We've just started marketing these audio toolkits to women's self-help and savings groups and organizations engaged in women's empowerment programs, so we only have about 30 women's self-help groups (about 500 women) currently using the solution. Most of them will go through the toolkit in 10 weeks, with measurable goals being set at the end. Initial prototyping research has shown that an increased understanding of self, better team work as a group, and an improved understanding/accountability of goal setting. We anticipate that this improved individual leader development will act as a lever for better agricultural and economic development.
We have been asked to take this concept and meld it with a maternal and child health program in Uganda (leadership for maternal/child health) that would potentially reach 20,000 mothers in Karamoja of Uganda. In western Ethiopia we are using the same concept to improve mentoring and HIV awareness/prevention for 3,000 young women. As more and more organizations hear and understand the concept we could see it spreading considerably in the next 3 years.
We're taking a 42 year old educational institution and expanding the possibilities. The Center for Creative Leadership has the mission to advance the understanding, practice and development of leadership for the benefit of society worldwide, and we're making sure that gets put into practice. Specifically, low cost innovations like this help us take high quality leadership development to the grassroots, to act as a lever for development programs.
CCL funded the initial development and prototyping stage. They've allowed me and others to spend time on this, and have leveraged knowledge to make this product relevant and effective.
We're working with other organizations to co-create solutions to bring this type of leadership development down to the grass roots level. The audio toolkit has already paid for the initial investment through grant funding. We are working to include the toolkit into other grant funded projects that will ensure long term funding. As we use this product in different initiatives (health, agricultural development, water and sanitation) we will contextualize and adapt the content to better serve the intended audience.
We are able to effectively partner within our organization and externally to create innovative products and process designs. Within CCL we work with the Research, Innovation, Product Design group (RIPD), our Africa regional Social Sector Innovation Hub, and our Europe, Middle East and Africa office in Brussels. In Ethiopia, we partner with Desert Rose Consulting for design, innovation, and anthropology support.
Lot's of internal support from RIPD and our Africa office. We also received financial support from a group of CEO/CFOs that were part of a Leadership at the Peak program at our Colorado office. They were moved by our both-and strategy and wanted to support it.
So far we have not received any push-back because of the low cost, low risk approach.