PROJECT DESIGN- assignment 1
(Edouard Yao and Jelena Barbir)
What’s the real problem?
The project has been focused on the Women’s Association of Koweit-Centre (AWKC), located in Koweit, a slum area of Yopougon
neighborhood in the northern part of Abidjan, Ivory Coast’s Capital city. AWKC has around 300 women members who are mostly
without job or they make for living developing small activities like selling fried bananas and fish next to the road.
In March 2010, ten randomly sampled AWKC’s members participated in needs assessment developed with aim to find out about the
women priorities. The data has been collected by conducting the Ten Seed Technique, where each woman was able to prioritize her
needs and then to vote on them by distributing 10 Awale seeds among the needs offered.
Awalé is game played rather frequently among the people of Western Africa, and that is why those seeds are chosen in purpose to
make the data collecting more attractive and interesting for the local people. AWKC members are willing to work with a project that
will meet some of their pressing needs.
The women prioritized between the problems listed in the table (table 1). The needs they described as the most urgent to be
improved are: inability to develop micro-business due to women’s inabilities to read and write, as well as lack of funding to initiate
micro-business, and limited access to potable water (table 1).
The full list of needs/problems and the vote results:
Failure in micro-businesses due to women’s inability to read and write
Limited access to potable water
Lack of funding for micro-business
Lack of job opportunities
Lack of appropriate sanitation system
Table 1: The list of problems and results of women voting
Votes out of 100
35
20
18
15
12
In accordance with the results gathered from the members of the AWKC association, it has been decided to design a project that
would address potable water supply, adult education (functional literacy and environment – sanitation) and preparing the local
people to initiate and run successfully micro-business initiatives.
This project therefore captured these community defined problems laid out in a simple project outline. One of the first challenges
was to unravel the mixture of needs, problems, causes and impacts that the community came up with:
Simple project outline of problems/causes/impacts:
Problems:
 Increasing poverty
 Poor health
Causes:




Lack of knowledge of starting new income generating opportunities
Lack of literacy capacity required for starting micro-enterprises
Limited funding sources for starting micro-enterprises
Lack of knowledge of good practices in water and sanitation
Their negative impacts:
 Families continue to live in poor sanitary conditions without access to potable water, children are unable to attend and
concentrate in school, and adults are unable to lead the prosperous, productive lives necessary for leaving the cycle of
poverty, and for contributing to the long-term development of their communities.
Problem Statement:
The women and children from the AWKC are suffering from increasing poverty and poor health caused by a lack of knowledge of
starting businesses, inability to read, limited funding for starting micro-enterprises and a lack of knowledge of good practices in
water and sanitation are leading to families continuing to live in poor sanitary conditions without access to potable water, children
that are unable to attend and concentrate in school, and adults that are unable to lead the prosperous, productive lives necessary
for leaving the cycle of poverty, and for contributing to the long-term development of their communities.