Co-Designing a Community Innovation Space with Senator Tokunbo Abiru – Co-Creation Hub Nigeria (CcHUB) : Co-Creation Hub Nigeria (CcHUB)

Senator Tokunbo Abiru of the Lagos East Constituency, as part of his initiative to drive youth empowerment, has partnered with Co-creation Hub to develop a Community Innovation Space for young people in Ikorodu.

Ikorodu is a large city with a population of over 1 million and a high percentage of young people between the ages of 15 – 35 years old. The area is plagued with challenges of unemployment and a lack of an enabling growth environment to foster their socio-economic development. There is a rising number of high school drop-outs, high rate of teenage pregnancy and an outcry of fraudulent & insecure activities which threatens the livelihood of business owners and traders.

Co-creation Hub Nigeria in its quest to drive relevant innovation across communities worked with Senator Tokunbo Abiru’s Constituency Team (TACT) and adopted human centered design to engage multiple stakeholders in and around Ikorodu alongside designers to conceptualise a Community Innovation Space. A first of its kind, to look into reinventing how innovation spaces are used to spur creativity and economic development across Africa. The aim of the Community Innovation Space is to create employment opportunities, inspire grass-roots innovations and build partnerships & networks that will drive economic prosperity and collaboratively solve significant social and business problems in Ikorodu, Lagos State. 

In applying human centered design, we identified this challenge statement: 

“How Might we create a growth driven environment in Ikorodu that will foster the reorientation of young people and empower them with the platform & opportunities which allows them to productively compete on a global scale?”

Designing the Community Innovation Space in line with the challenge statement was divided into three phases:

Phase 1: Stakeholder Mapping

Phase 2: Data Collection & Research

Phase 3: Summary of Findings and Co-Design of the Community Innovation Space

We applied human-centered design to carry out the research in the work across the different levels. The goal was to properly discover the challenges faced by the young people in Ikorodu.

Methodology

The uniqueness of this project was properly captured by our application of human centered design. Human-centered design facilitates the development of unique solutions that are created to meet the needs of people. The process does not assume that it knows what the people need, in fact the process emphasizes solutions instead of focusing on the assumed problems. Amongst the key mindsets leveraged by this methodology is empathy; empathy allows the design of solutions by stepping in the shoes of the end-users, seeing from their perspective and generating a clear understanding of their unique needs. The process of this approach starts and ends with the people we are creating for. 

We applied the methods of design research to allow us do the following:

For the Community Innovation Space project in Ikorodu, we applied the human centered design methodology to carry out the following:

1. Selection

I. Selection of Primary Schools, Secondary Schools, Community Leaders / Political Leaders, Non-Governmental Organization & Civil Society Organizations, Market Sites and other Educational Institutions

2. Field Visits

I. Field visits to Schools and Markets

II. Field visits to Community / Political Leaders

III. Field visits to Civil Society Organizations

3. Virtual Engagement

I. Online Surveys

II. Virtual Interviews

The table below highlights the various research methods applied and the participants engaged in order for us to discover & define the problems, understand the insights as well as gather suggestions that can be utilized to co-design the Community Innovation Space in Ikorodu. 

Research Method	Participants	No of Respondents
One-on-one Interviews	Political / Community Leaders & Civil Society Organizations, Market Women and Business Owners, Parents	16
Focus Group Discussions	Teachers, Primary school students	31
Virtual Interviews	Non-Governmental Organizations	4
Online Survey	End Users (graduates, undergraduates, young entrepreneurs, creatives)	215
Paper-Based Questionnaires	Secondary school students	42

A total of 308 participants from Ikorodu were engaged using human centered design. The participants were representative of those who would directly or indirectly benefit from the co-design of the Community Innovation Space.

Our Findings

1. Problems/ Challenges faced by Youths in Ikorodu

The table below thematically summarizes the common themes, outliers and the red flags around the problems plaguing the young people in Ikorodu.

Participant Group	Common Themes	Outliers	Red flags
Students	Lack of Employability Skills. Jobless Graduates. Lack of Business Support. Need for training.	Absence of a growth/motivating environment that facilitates their learning
Teachers	Lack of 21st Century Skills like problem-solving, critical thinking, etc. Distractions	The attitude of young people towards success- they have a get rich quick mentality.	An outdated curriculumThe divided attention of young people in secondary school engaged in schooling and learning.
NGOs	Lack of Employability Skills. Lack of Business Support. Grants. Career choice problem.	Poor mental orientation of young people in Ikorodu- exposure to negative behaviours	High rise of teenage pregnancyDefective training programmes & failed projects
Market Women	Adoption of Fraudulent behaviours. Young people are willing to work and learn, but the environment is not conducive.	There are a lot of nuisances caused by touts against those who trade in the market.
Parents	Unemployment.	Lack of relevant work experience	Lack of finance to raise and properly train children
Political / Community Leaders	Threats of cultism. Frustration with the government.	A lack of productive engagement- absence of opportunities and programmes that are profitable to young people
End Users (graduates, undergraduates, young entrepreneurs, creatives)	Lack of training & skills. Lack of opportunities	Lack of mentorship

2. Suggested Solutions to the challenges faced by young people

The chart below summarizes the solutions that the different participants suggested to resolve the challenges faced by young people in Ikorodu. 

3. Co-Designing a Community Innovation Space: Suggested Programmes 

The participants gave their suggestions for co-designing the Community Innovation Space. The following table shows the summary of the themes that the Community Innovation Space should focus on:

Participant Group	Common Themes	Outliers
Students	Mentorship Programmes. Employment Scheme Training.	Innovation Competitions amongst Students from Schools
Teachers	Holiday Training Programmes. IT Skills. Reorientation Programmes.	An accessible space with hub networks in selected schools. Each school would have a hub where training would be done, all coordinated by the Community Innovation Space.
NGOs	Leadership Programmes. Business Training Programmes. ICT Programmes.	Collaboration with existing IT-based organizations to establish ICT centres to expand across the several zones in Ikorodu. When youths attend, they can be trained, and there is a plan to get them employed in partner organizations.
Market Women		Funding to support new and existing businesses.  Commercial items distribution scheme – a business model that allows people to earn money by serving as distributors of goods like beverages, noodles, etc.
Parents	Vocational Training Programmes. Agri-Preneurship Programmes.	Talent Hunt Competitions
Political / Community Leaders	Reorientation Programmes – focus on changing the mindsets of young people towards success, jobs, opportunities.	A Learn, Work & Play Hub.Leverage Partnerships with Industries to sponsor youth
End Users (graduates, undergraduates, young entrepreneurs, creatives)	Hackathons, Meetups, Bootcamps. Properly-monitored incubators for businesses & startups	Partnerships with companies that reside in Ikorodu to support or drive these initiativesIntroduction to open source technology programmes

From the results of our findings shown above, we see that the problem of unemployment can be solved. This highlights that the two key needs for young people can be summarized as “the need for training & skills” and “access to world-class opportunities”. This is the kind of environment that the Community Innovation Space seeks to promote.

Your Feedback

The engagement with the various stakeholders of Ikorodu so far has produced the above focus areas, in terms of what the Community Innovation Space should cover. The essence of this blog is to further crowdsource from you, the public and the inhabitants of Ikorodu, based on the information we have gathered. 

Do you have other ideas that could help improve employment and economic opportunities for young people in Ikorodu? If so, click the form below to tell us!