Leveraging Human-Centered Design Thinking in India


Goal: Engage parents and build a community to support children through new podcasts with Dost Education.

Background: In India, there are still over 160 million illiterate women; over 11 million of whom are between the ages of 15 and 24 years old. These women become mothers who are motivated to give their children better opportunities in education but often, these resource-constrained parents struggle the most.

Partner: Dost Education‘s vision is to turn every home into a learning center by giving parents of any literacy level tools to support their child’s early development and lifelong learning. They use mobile technology, research-backed curriculum, machine learning, and behavioral science to solve everyday parenting problems as well as nudge parents to nurture cognitive and socio-emotional development in their kids. To accomplish this goal, they use a mix of one-minute “phonecasts” (podcasts deployed via telephone call), digital parent coaching, and a peer-to-peer learning network.

Project: In partnership with Team4Tech, 8 corporate volunteers from Adobe virtually supported Dost Education. During the project, Dost leveraged the skillset of the Adobe volunteers and designed a process to create engaging, relevant, and targeted phonecast content to support their parents and create a greater sense of community. They used human-centered design thinking and updated the onboarding and outreach process of the Dost Parent Champions, especially as Dost moved toward a completely virtual model. With Team4Tech’s support, they reached over 30K families and approximately 60K pre-primary learners.