The GoDown Art Centre - Home of Nairobits
Whilst not strictly related to my PhD, I thought I’d write a small piece about Nairobits, an organisation I spent a few days with on my recent trip to Kenya.
Empowering Youth
Nairobits is a non-profit organisation aimed at empowering underprivelaged youth with ICT and multimedia skills. I visited them for an afternoon and felt so inspired I spent the rest of my week with them. I met with Tosh, the head instructor at Nairobits to learn about what they do and how I might be able to help.
With centres in all of the major slums in Nairobi, and branches in Zanzibar and soon in Uganda, Nairobits aims to take children from these informal settlements and give them a solid education in IT and multimedia. Over the course of 18 months, students go through a training course that takes them from basic IT skills through to being functional and efficient users of industry standard software such as Photoshop and Dreamweaver. Students are taught database and web development skills, project management and presentation skills, and a significant amount of time is spent on design education. They are all asked to come up with community based projects which they develop and work on throughout the course of their education.
The success rate
Nairobits student John talking me through his community hospital idea and the website he designed and built for it.
Nairobits have educated hundreds of students over the last 10 years or so. The amazing thing is this: students have a 98% success rate in obtaining employment upon completion of their course. Through a number of industry partnerships, all students enter a 6 month internship after graduating, and the majority of them are then employed on a full time basis. Absolutely incredible.
User centred design
Coincidentally, students were in the middle of their design curriculum in the week I visited them. After offering to help, Tosh suggested I work with him to put together a week of lessons in and around user centred design. The students were learning about grids, colour theory and layout but there was nothing about usability or user centered design.
For a week of lessons, what we came up with was this:
- Introduction to UX and why understanding and designing for your users is important.
- Introducing Neilson’s 10 heuristics with real world examples of each
- Applying the heuristics: The evaluation of a real checkout process
- Process design and wireframing: redesigning the checkout process
- User testing: coming up with a test script and testing the new design
- Reporting: writing up findings from the tests and recommending/making design changes
The curriculum is meant to be introductory and basic, and will be implemented in next year’s course. Any feedback is welcome and appreciated.
IT is being seen as a ‘helping’ profession more and more often, and Nairobits is one example of how our skills can be used to give people opportunities they wouldn’t have before. I managed to meet some ex-students whilst I was there, including some who had gone on to start their own small businesses, and all were still using the skills they had learned during their time at Nairobits. The current students were very motivated, articulate and curious, and loved hearing about projects I had worked on. I had an amazing time and will definitely be back.
Keep up the amazing work Anna, Tosh and the team!
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