30% of Dominican girls get pregnant before they turn 20
limited education and information, educational reinforcement and the limited or missing access to contraceptives. these are the main reasons for a high rate of pregnancy and sexual transmitted diseases within dominican youth.
this is something, UNFPA wants to change.
The UNFPA has a mission: giving adolescents the possibility of entering adulthood healthy and starting their family life by choice and educated.
Together with my colleagues at iconmobile we created an application for teenagers to help the UNFPA achieve their mission.
Making this big change
Why using the mobile channel?
The UNFPA has been involved in the work with and for adolescents in the Dominican Republic for a long time now. They know that smartphones are highly common to be owned and used by Dominican youth. Most adolescents would walk long distances to connect to public wifi. They say themselves that they try to use it as often as possible.
Judgement and limited privacy is something Dominican youth faces on a daily basis. The smartphone has become a personal tool which can be used to consume content privately and to connect to others.
“if I was queen of an island, I would install a big antenna and provide wifi to everyone” –Alanna, 16
with planeapp we provide sexual education content in a private, youth-friendly format. users now have easy access to real life services that they can use on- or offline.
How did we do this?
Research Workshop
We invited Dominican youth to our Berlin office. In a bilingual workshop we learned more about the problem from those who are the closest to the target group – UNFPA youth that interacts with the target group on a daily basis.
By using a variety of chosen design methods we learned more about the adolescents’ life and social environments and phone use. We guided them creating representative user stories and learned how the target group would prefer to consume sex education content.
Co-Creation Workshop
We traveled to the Dominican Republic to hold a co-creation workshop with 20 adolescents. We let them put themselves into the shoes of personas and create applications to solve their problems.
What would an app have to do to solve the issue? How would you interact with it and what would the content be like?
Field Research
planeapp provides access to sex education content & real life services
Content can be filtered by topic to make it easier to find what is needed. The UNFPA provides content as images, videos and as text format to target different age groups, interests and privacy needs.
Some of the content is created by the UNFPA youth which makes it easier to identify with.
An integrated map creates transparency of close by services. The user can filter POI’s and find actual details and information.
The users can explore a list of the most common questions or decide to ask their own via e-mail by using a straight forward question form.
My Roles in this Project
Planning // Research // Analysis // Concept