By Communications Department
The PROMAD Foundation has hosted a Technology and Human-Centred Designs in Development workshop in Lafia, Nasarawa State.
According to the founder and executive director, Daisi Omokungbe said the workshop was crucial to enlighten and empower governance and development stakeholders on the importance of ensuring that development interventions are human-centred and driven by data and technology (civic tech and gov-tech) to meet the needs of citizens and underrepresented grassroots communities and urban cities.
“This workshop is crucial to making development interventions human-centred to solve real problems and make it work for the people. We have in the two months implemented a survey in line with the human-centred approach in development to understand governance issues in Nasarawa State.
“Our findings coupled with the data collected will be presented during this workshop so as for the participants, especially, the state actors here in the room to understand the challenges and begin to adopt the principle of a human-centred approach in government interventions in the State,” he said.
He noted that the human-centred design approach is simply putting humans or people at the centre of the development process to identify the needs of stakeholders, ideate and develop solutions, and ensure effective implementation to improve service delivery.
Omokungbe added that the essence of the workshop is to make the use of technology and government policies more people-centred to improve citizens’ participation and service delivery.
The founder and the programmes officer, Emmanuel Sani, delivered presentations on:
- Government Policy Engagements (GPE),
- Access to Information (ATI) and Open Data (OD), and
- Development of Civic Tech and Gov Tech Tools.
Participants who were drawn from the government and civil society organisations in the State also participated in group discussions on the strategies to reinforce a human-centred approach in development interventions.
Participants in their feedback thanked PROMAD and its partners for the opportunities to participate in the workshop and promised to utilise the approach in their future development interventions.
The workshop was part of the activities marking the last segment of the Strengthening Participation, Accountability and Participation in States (SPATS) Project supported through the WYDE Civic Engagement Project by the Kofi Annan Foundation (KAF); European Partnership for Democracy (EPD); Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD); the Oslo Center and funded by the European Union (EU).