Challenge
Going through adolescence is a fundamentally formative experience for any girl regardless of culture or race. In Myanmar, this experience is little understood. This 2018 study designed to generate new insight to help businesses better understand girls and design better products, services and opportunities to bring about positive change in the lives of large numbers of adolescent girls.
Approach
Our Myanmar team conducted a ‘girl landscaping’ study, using a range of participatory approaches including drawing and overnight home-stays. These methods illuminated girls’ lives in context generating powerful insights into their earning, learning, saving and keeping safe. The team then led Human-Centered Design (HCD) testing of a set of business prototypes created by each girl-focused enterprise.
Insight
Through workshops with girls, parents, teachers, religious leaders, and local decision-makers, we helped SPRING to navigate competing priorities and motivations. For example, girls’ desire for independence versus safety in public places; or parents’ and girls’ longing for education versus the need to earn, to care for relatives or to marry.
Impact
Subsequently, Kantar in Myanmar has set up training for teams from civil-society based organisations across Myanmar in these girl research techniques, thereby contributing to the sustainability of girl-focused business innovation and aligning with the Sustainable Development Goal of achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls (SDG 5).