The Creative Approaches to African Development module enables students to use their critical thinking skills to analyze, deconstruct, and understand complex problems within their local and global communities via identified African Union (AU) Development Goals. Students will be able to apply the lessons learned across the Ashesi introductory Fall sessions. Students will work together in teams to understand how they can best design methodologies for big ideas and possible solutions relative to their communities.

Module Objective: Students should be able to use creative problem solving to analyze, deconstruct, and substantively address complex real-world challenges that are aligned with the AU Goals.

Activity: Students will demonstrate their understanding of the challenge, root causes and portray what is the status quo. This will be accomplished by identifying key stakeholders, dynamics, feedback loops and explaining the elements in the system rather than listing the actors. Students will research local and global factors and stakeholders that play a role in the ecosystem such as businesses, government, non-profit and other tangential factors. By critically analyzing the complexity of the system through a systems dynamics lens, students will identify gaps and how to lever the system or new entities to fill in the gaps. They are not proposing fully formed solution per se, but rather identifying potential areas for improvement and proposing some ways in which the improvement can be initiated.

Faculty: Jewel Thompson (Coordinator); Philip Asare; William Murithi; Prince Aning; Heather Beem; Nicholas Tali

Faculty Interns: Emmanuel Derry Wanye; Albert Bensusan; Nicole Nyboe; Dennis Sifuna