Banyan Tree Foundation | Workshop on Education Programs for Adolescents

August  – October 2015

EdIntersect designed and facilitated a human-centered design workshop with grantee organizations from Kenya, Sierra Leone, Nepal, and Ethiopia on mentorship and leadership-focused work. The overarching goal was to bring all country teams to the workshop site in northern Virginia to gain greater insight in designing programs with and for adolescents. These programs were intended to drive academic progress, in particular reading and numeracy remediation, and to mitigate dropout in upper primary school and secondary school. EdIntersect prepared the workshop taking into account the current work of each grantee in early primary programming, sustainability, and monitoring and evaluation. Deliverables included a targeted literature review, training materials and a pre-workshop assignment for all 25 workshop participants. EdIntersect provided a design-thinking approach to workshop facilitation on life skills and leadership building, the role of parents and communities in retention of children in school (including socio-emotional factors in adolescence), and assessing results. Participants reflected meta-cognitively on how this design-thinking workshop facilitation method could be used to enhance their ongoing programs.