21st Century Skills:Building Youth Capacity to Problem Solve

The demands of today’s workforce are ever-evolving. Advances in mechanization and computing create instability and uncertainty in the job market, particularly in developing economies. Creative Capacity Building is an inclusive approach to community development that teaches young people a flexible approach to problem-solving they can use in any work environment.

D-Lab’s Creative Capacity Building approach builds confidence in young people in low-income communities by exposing them to a framework to approach everyday challenges they see in their community as well as concrete, hands-on skills to design technological solutions to those challenges. Participants learn and experience that anyone can become an active creator of technology, not just a passive recipient of solutions from the outside.

This strategic combination of confidence and skills-building helps young people go on and launch (or grow) their own small enterprises, enabling them to more fully participate and prosper in the economy.

Leading workforce development experts point to problem-solving as a key skill young people need to thrive in the global economy.

In Literacy is Not Enough: 21st Century Fluencies for the Digital Age, authors emphasize “solutions fluency,” “creativity fluency,” and “collaboration fluency,” — skills Creative Capacity Building builds and nurtures — as critical to young people’s success. “Students must master different skills to succeed in a culture of technology-driven automation, abundance, and access to global labor markets,” they write.

An external evaluator is currently studying the economic impact of Creative Capacity Building through a randomized control trial in Uganda.

The following are key outcomes of Creative Capacity Building that would more fully enable young people to participate and prosper in their local economies:

• Increased ability to apply a problem-solving approach in a work environment
• Increased confidence in designing and developing local solutions themselves
• Increased ability to identify and act upon income generation opportunities

D-Lab is most interested in reaching young people between the ages of 16-24 living on less than $3 a day in developing economies. We find the most effective and sustainable way to deploy CCB is by using a localized “training of trainers” approach.

Six- and 18-week follow-up surveys - 90% of trainees report increased confidence in applying problem-solving skills in a work environment

Six- and 18-week follow-up surveys - 70% of trainees report increased confidence in designing and developing their own solutions to local challenges

Six- and 18-week follow-up surveys - 70% of trainees report leveraging the skills learned from the training to take advantage of a new or growing income generation opportunity

Where most international development approaches center on delivering solutions to communities, or perhaps marginally better, use human-centered design to better inform the solutions they deliver, Creative Capacity Building (CCB) promotes design by the intended beneficiaries and users. This approach is unique as it seeks to empower young people to be active creators of technology rather than passive recipients. In so doing, young people not only develop their problem-solving skills, they experience a sense of pride and accomplishment in what they have created and an increased sense of agency and belief in their ability to improve their situation.

Creative Capacity Building is a radically inclusive design approach that goes beyond human-centered design to create a design approach driven by – not just informed by — community members themselves. The training is designed to be accessible for all people – regardless of education level, socioeconomic status, and literacy rate. From the beginning, Creative Capacity Building welcomes all people to identify and frame the challenges they see, generate ideas to address those challenges, and then collaboratively develop the solutions to those challenges using local materials, resources, and know-how.

D-Lab delivers Creative Capacity Building trainings and programming in conjunction with community partners whose staff are trained as trainers in the approach so as to make impact more sustainable and long-lasting at the local level. Community partners also play a key role in identifying promising participants for the trainings, and supporting those trainees in their entrepreneurial endeavors after the trainings are complete. Participants are not expected to pay for the trainings, which are typically financed by grants or charitable contributions from individuals, foundations, governments, or corporations invested in building community resilience for global development impact.

As previously mentioned, D-Lab uses a localized “training of trainers” model to allow Creative Capacity Building to be mastered and delivered at the local level, which we see as a more sustainable and contextually-appropriate approach.

Oftentimes, this entails integrating a training of trainers model into new and existing programs implemented by our international nonprofit partners who are looking to address a specific development challenge using existing funding sources. Leveraging the Creative Capacity Building approach gives these partners an opportunity to more deeply engage the communities in which they work, adding real value to their program.

  D-Lab is also exploring models in which delivering co-creation and design trainings to private sector partners as a service might better subsidize the delivery of Creative Capacity Building programs in low-income communities.

Given Creative Capacity Building’s emphasis on a bottom-up, inclusive approach to problem-solving rather than a centralized, top-down approach, it can be difficult to comprehensively track the impact of this work. Workforce development and behavior change are complex fields, and we are still learning how CCB impacts each. Additionally, it is challenging to measure the ripple effect that Creative Capacity Building can have on a community. As previously mentioned, a randomized control trial studying the effects of Creative Capacity Building is being conducted, and further study is necessary to fully understand how this approach can be used to produce development outcomes.

https://impact-alliance.mit.edu/news/creative-capacity-building-grassroots-approach-design-and-development

https://impact-alliance.mit.edu/news/your-heart-your-hands-perspectives-creative-capacity-building-participants

http://www.idin.org/blog-news-events/blog/collective-introspection-seed-good-monitoring-evaluation-part-ii

We are interested in joining the Solve community to connect with new partners. In particular, we are looking to identify partners currently implementing regional or global education and workforce development programs that could derive value from incorporating the Creative Capacity Building approach into existing curriculum. Creative Capacity Building trainings are an effective and exciting way to introduce young people to the basics of problem-solving, collaboration, innovation, and entrepreneurship through hands-on, experiential learning. Depending on a partner’s needs, Creative Capacity Building can be delivered as an add-on module to existing curriculum, or implemented as a comprehensive program on its own. 

These Hands and Botswana Innovation Hub (Botswana)

Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology and Kumasi Hive (Ghana)

Link4 and Universidad del Valle (Guatemala)

ECHO East Africa Impact Center and Twende Social Innovation Center (Tanzania)

Teso Women’s Development Initiative and Caritas (Uganda) 

We are not aware of other programs that use this approach.