Gender Equality Design Labs

Challenge

Health innovations often emerge from scientific breakthroughs targeting global minority contexts but are subsequently deployed in global majority communities without adequate consideration of local values, priorities, cultures, and needs. This disconnect risks diluting the effectiveness of these solutions. The Gates Foundation’s Gender Equality Data & Insights (GE D&I) Division recognizes that engaging women and girls in global majority communities early and consistently is critical to designing impactful health innovations. To address this, the Gender Equality Design Labs aim to develop community-centered solutions, grounded in the lived experiences of women, to reframe and refine investment hypotheses.

Work

Over the past 18 months, Catapult Design and its collaborators are facilitating Gender Equality Design Labs in Kenya, Nigeria, and Senegal. These labs are built around the Pathways vulnerabilities segmentation framework, ensuring targeted engagement with women across diverse behavioral, socioeconomic, and cultural backgrounds. The goal is to co-create insights that shape future health innovations while establishing mechanisms for sustained engagement.

The initiative began with research in Nigeria, where Catapult partnered with Dodo Design to explore two primary hypotheses:

1. Counseling and Education: If women are provided education, counseling, and opportunities to try new vaginal insertable products (like the dapivirine ring), user acceptance and sustained interest will increase.
2. Family Planning and STI Prevention: Vaginally administered products offering dual benefits—contraception and HIV/STI prevention—may hold greater appeal for women.

Initial efforts included recruiting 30 women across five Pathways vulnerability segments in Northern and Southern Nigeria, conducting 28 individual interviews and 7 focus groups in English, Hausa, and Yoruba.

A Learning Agenda was established to guide research, with questions designed to uncover emotional, social, and behavioral factors influencing women’s health decisions. The agenda informed the development of a Research Guide, which Dodo Design used to structure fieldwork and synthesize findings into actionable insights.

In parallel, Catapult designed and tested a two-part Labs Platform:

1. Data Capture & Management: A central repository for raw data, transcripts, and workshop outputs.
2. Engaging with Data, Findings, and Insights: An interactive tool enabling the Gates Foundation team to connect hypotheses with real-world stories, quotes, and qualitative insights.

The platform includes annotations, quotes, photos, storyboards, and audio snapshots, making data queryable by hypothesis and segment. This ensures transparency and accessibility for ongoing decision-making.

Results

The Gender Equality Design Labs are in progress, with promising early results from Nigeria. Findings and insights from the Labs are being uploaded to the platform and will guide expanded research in Senegal and Kenya. Stay tuned for more updates!