SAYDS MEDIA
November 16, 2022
Poor educational outcomes as a complex system exhibit a high level of features that requires immediate and significant analysis for easier interventions.
Makongeni Estate, Makadara.
The workshop’s main goal was to engage with the community we live in and get their involvement in improving the SIP (Systemic Insights For Policy) for education that we have created. We aim to tap into the community’s knowledge of education.
Their experiences with the education system and use that knowledge to improve SIP documents. Another goal (long term) was to train the youth on how to generate systemic insights for policy on complexities.
The workshop covered specifically invited participants from the region. The intended purpose was to bring youth to a discussion table. The social issue we care about is poor education outcomes in Makadara. Education is a complex social problem with several variables that form causal relationships. This was explained using a causal loop diagram during the session. The Makadara Team became motivated to understand the reason behind the poor outcome of the education system among youth in Makadara using complexity and systems thinking tools. Today Kenya suffers quality of education setbacks. Youth in Makadara mostly believe that jobs are lacking in the region and the country because they have inadequate job-securing skill sets.
Consequently, most schools do not teach technical skills. As a result, the end product is individuals who cannot secure decent jobs. Relating this situation to the social problem we care about, we found out that most graduates are form four leavers who lack skills such as digital and innovative skills, among others. According to available data, the high level of unemployment in Kenya indicates that supply surpasses demand, public school infrastructure is dilapidated, teaching materials and models are outdated, and the teacher-student ratio is disproportionately pathetic. To address these issues and ensure skills provision is prioritized in Makadara, it would be better to use system thinking as the best diagnostic tool.
The participants shared their ideas concerning key points about education as the major problem leading to the region’s unemployment rates. These are the gaps they addressed :
This workshop consisted of 15 participants. They include SCA members (systems thinkers), Regional coordinator (SAYDS), students(both secondary and tertiary), young entrepreneurs, and Teachers.
SCA stands for SAYDS Community Association, a semi-autonomous arm of SAYDS that aims to implement projects during the fellowship. The association supports its members in implementing social initiatives to create positive social change.
SIP, which stands for Systemic Insights for Policy, is the key value of SCA. SIP structure aims at addressing Devolution. Devolution is the opportunity that SIP will assist the youth to be part and parcel of the government’s voice. This will enable the youth to become a political development and governance vehicle.
It is a policy document that has gathered information about the social problem we care about using systematic approaches. The document is enriched with systemic approaches learned from CAT and SIT and gathered from community forums and stakeholder consultations.
The response to the session was positive. The participants were overwhelmed. Only a few wanted clarity on the following points:
Our team used CAT and SIT to respond to the two questions. The team stated that SCA was started with the primary purpose of serving the community and acting as an umbrella that includes everyone, especially the harmed.
The team described the systematic approach using CAT and SIP and gave reasons why this approach was more important to simplify a complex problem than a non-systematic approach.
Complexity is a theory that was first developed in the natural sciences field. The general understanding of this part is that a system always has several interconnected components that fit into a structure.
The main idea here was to bring the knowledge of system thinking to the community to understand how important problem solving should be to follow a chronological approach. The team tackled the four parts immensely.
A participant kept arguing why we focus much more on the problem than on what it takes to get it solved. This enabled us to walk the participants through all four parts of CAT and how we ended up with our social issue.
A network comprises interactions and interconnections. Interactions are actions (what one does to the other agents and flow (transmission of resources, e.g.money, ideas, and diseases). Interconnections include similarities (what two agents share in common such as location, membership, or attributes) and social relations, such as knowledge, kingship, and social role that agents share with others.
Both interaction and interconnection share a nonlinear relationship whereby an interaction can cause, strengthen, and weaken interconnection and vice versa.
In this network concerning poor education outcomes in Makadara, the agents work with or against, cooperate, collude, or protect each other. The team used a social network diagram to expand the relationship between interaction and interconnection.
SIT is to provide the knowledge for effectively designing a solution for complex social problems that we care about. SIT helps us appreciate and understand the perspectives of all relevant stakeholders in the system, how to create boundaries of the system, changes in the interaction of the system, and how to design holistic interventions. This is done after we analyze the complex social problem.
A stakeholder is a person who has an interest in a given situation. When designing a solution, we must consider the action that would satisfy each stakeholder’s interest.
The team summarized the stages they underwent during the policy process and making. They stressed that the guide was used to familiarize the youth with the processes and formalities involved in policy formulation. This enabled participants to believe that systems thinking is a broad approach.
During our workshop, we found out that:
Since our main goal was to get the additional information and refine the details gathered and used to enrich the SIP document, the following were the key highlights pointed out during the workshop :
The workshop was carried out per the scheduled program, and we met our overall objectives. Participants benefited from the training and were ready to be part of the learning process in days to come.
You will be placed in the appropriate team or project depending on your skills and experience. Please reach out if you can assist us in any of the following fields: