UPSHIFT Social Innovation Training Cohort 1 – Week4/Day1

On 24th August 2021, Cohort 1 of the Upshift program, had its first session for the fourth week. The session was on brainstorming concepts and guidelines. This entailed redefining their problem statements and learning the structure of a problem tree.

To start the session, the students signed up to ratatype.com to practice the lessons available. This was to help with their typing skills. Mr. Jerry instructed them to finish all of the lessons on the platform, therefore they had to use the first 15 minutes of every lesson to do so. After, the students were required to sign into their outlook accounts and send a message to their trainer with regards to their group research problem statements.

Later, Mr. Jerry told the students to sit in groups and present their problem statements. Problem statements presented included teenage pregnancy, poor sanitation due to lack of dustbins, and poor layout as a result of sanitation problems. Also, they raised problems such as lateness and truancy. Mr. Jerry encouraged them to work hard and gave them some tips to help with these issues. The students also shared experiences from their interviews and highlighted the problems they encountered. Furthermore, the trainer explained the various brainstorming concepts and guidelines. Among these were redefining their problem statements, learning the structure of a problem statement and a problem tree. He taught them the 5 whys, which was a powerful strategy that would help them understand the causes of their identified problems.

At the end of the session, the trainer gave each group an assignment to draw a problem tree. He also gave them sheets of paper where they had to write their goals, roles, skills values, purpose, rules, and activities for the next session.