Leveraging humancentered design to improve gender-equitable adolescent programming in DRC and Indonesia: Process Brief & Learning

As part of its efforts to advance innovative social and behavior change (SBC) approaches for youth, Breakthrough ACTION applied human-centered design (HCD) to develop gender-equitable interventions with very young adolescents (VYA) in three of the GEAS multi-year cohort sites: Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Denpasar and Semarang, Indonesia. HCD was selected as a methodology that would allow for meaningful youth engagement in designing programs that shape their lives. In Kinshasa, DRC, the HCD process was used to iterate and improve Growing Up GREAT!, a multi-level gender-transformative SRH program for in-school and out-of-school VYAs implemented by Save the Children. The HCD process set out to address several challenges in engaging caregivers for the family component of Growing Up GREAT! that emerged during the pilot. In Indonesia, the HCD process was designed to build on SETARA (Semangat Dunia Remaja or Teen Aspirations), a two-year comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) intervention implemented in junior high schools in Indonesia under the Explore4Action project. The HCD process sought to design complementary interventions that cut across the social-ecological level, reaching not only VYAs, but also their caregivers, teachers, community leaders
and health providers – to promote more equitable gender and social norms in support of adolescent health and wellbeing. This document shares the key steps in the HCD process and the resulting concepts and prototypes of potential behavioral interventions to foster a supportive equitable environment for VYAs in DRC and Indonesia.