The challenges of healthcare delivery in Africa are well documented. Advances in technology prese... more The challenges of healthcare delivery in Africa are well documented. Advances in technology present an opportunity to address some of these challenges in a cost-effective manner. Notwithstanding these advances, many initiatives fail to deliver the desired benefits, with a lack of citizen engagement cited as one of the reasons for this failure. Design thinking is an approach to innovation that places human needs at the centre of design by gaining empathy with those for whom the designs are initiated. This paper reports on the empathy building conducted in trying to understand the needs of mothers seeking postnatal care in a low-income neighbourhood in Zimbabwe. Through interviews, observations, journals, and using service-dominant logic theory to analyse the output, a picture emerges of the lives of the mothers and babies, and their interaction with the healthcare system. Working in teams with mobile application developers and nurses, the mothers participate in a workshop that produces points of view that define problems the teams would like addressed, using technology in a design thinking exercise. This paper reports on the work of hospital midwives, and chronicles the lives of several mothers in the eight weeks after giving birth. It also sets out four design challenges based on the points of view derived from the design thinking workshops.
Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, 2018
Everywhere in the world, governments consider the use of Information and Communication Technologi... more Everywhere in the world, governments consider the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to drive improvements in service delivery with wide-ranging e-government initiatives. The health sector in particular faces the twin challenge of growing populations requiring services and dwindling resources in the face of reduced funding. Design thinking has over the last 20 years developed into a “design paradigm” that can assist service providers to craft solutions to problems that take into account the needs and views of stakeholders involved. Using a design science research approach underpinned by a pragmatist philosophy, this study develops a model for consolidating empathy input in a design thinking process.
Governments the world over spend billions of dollars on e-government initiatives with the intenti... more Governments the world over spend billions of dollars on e-government initiatives with the intention of improving the efficiency and effectiveness of service delivery to their constituencies. Despite the large amounts of money that is spent on these projects, lured by the array of potential benefits that can be delivered, the list of failed projects is long, mainly because the complexity of undertaking such projects is often understated and the demands of a public value approach make e-government projects even more complex. Public value theory suggests that citizens value those services they authorise, whose creation they participate in and whose outcomes they relate to. This study seeks to understand how governments prioritise e-government initiatives in order to maximise public value. This study is based on an interpretive case study of an e-government program in Zimbabwe, a country in Southern Africa, consisting of a number of projects that have to be prioritised. Using public value theory as a theoretical lens, six interviews were conducted with senior managers involved in the program, complimented by a review of various project related documents and followed by a focus group of thirteen managers which was used to rank the relative importance of various criteria that relate to the delivery of public value. Using a prioritisation framework developed as part of this study, a mock prioritisation of a menu of projects was conducted and this was compared to the actual prioritisation that had beencarried out during the implementation of the program. The study finds that public managers believe that seeking public authorisation is undesirable, unnecessary and that governments are often ill equipped to undertake this task. Co-creation of services with the public is seen as desirable, mainly because government does not have the resources to undertake all the initiatives they have to and appear to welcome any assistance that is available. Public managers appear to struggle to relate the projects they undertake to outcomes that citizens relate to, but seem to be focussed on more immediate measures, a likely throwback to new public management thinking. The study concludes that the lack of citizen participation in project conceptualisation and service creation and delivery can be overcome by the use of more and more commonly available technologies such as social media and the increasing proliferation of the internet even in fairly remote parts of Africa to not only better understand citizen priorities but to engage the citizen in creating the services they consume and deliver on the outcomes they value.
Everywhere in the world governments consider the use of Information and Communication Technologie... more Everywhere in the world governments consider the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to drive improvements in service delivery with wide ranging e-government initiatives. The health sector in particular faces the twin challenge of growing populations requiring services and dwindling resources in the face of reduced funding. Yet developments in ICT present an opportunity to streamline service offering in a way that maxim-ises the available meagre resources. These e-Health initiatives require the input and the support of the public that health institutions serve. Design thinking has over the last twenty years developed into a " design paradigm " that can assist service providers to craft solutions to problems that take into account the needs and views of stakeholders involved. Using a design science research approach underpinned by a pragmatist philosophy, this study develops a model for consolidating empathy input in a design thinking process. The model was iteratively tested in a healthcare setting focusing on the provision of postnatal care services in a developing environment setting.
The challenges of healthcare delivery in Africa are well documented. Advances in technology prese... more The challenges of healthcare delivery in Africa are well documented. Advances in technology present an opportunity to address some of these challenges in a cost-effective manner. Notwithstanding these advances, many initiatives fail to deliver the desired benefits, with a lack of citizen engagement cited as one of the reasons for this failure. Design thinking is an approach to innovation that places human needs at the centre of design by gaining empathy with those for whom the designs are initiated. This paper reports on the empathy building conducted in trying to understand the needs of mothers seeking postnatal care in a low-income neighbourhood in Zimbabwe. Through interviews, observations, journals, and using service-dominant logic theory to analyse the output, a picture emerges of the lives of the mothers and babies, and their interaction with the healthcare system. Working in teams with mobile application developers and nurses, the mothers participate in a workshop that produces points of view that define problems the teams would like addressed, using technology in a design thinking exercise. This paper reports on the work of hospital midwives, and chronicles the lives of several mothers in the eight weeks after giving birth. It also sets out four design challenges based on the points of view derived from the design thinking workshops.
Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, 2018
Everywhere in the world, governments consider the use of Information and Communication Technologi... more Everywhere in the world, governments consider the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to drive improvements in service delivery with wide-ranging e-government initiatives. The health sector in particular faces the twin challenge of growing populations requiring services and dwindling resources in the face of reduced funding. Design thinking has over the last 20 years developed into a “design paradigm” that can assist service providers to craft solutions to problems that take into account the needs and views of stakeholders involved. Using a design science research approach underpinned by a pragmatist philosophy, this study develops a model for consolidating empathy input in a design thinking process.
Governments the world over spend billions of dollars on e-government initiatives with the intenti... more Governments the world over spend billions of dollars on e-government initiatives with the intention of improving the efficiency and effectiveness of service delivery to their constituencies. Despite the large amounts of money that is spent on these projects, lured by the array of potential benefits that can be delivered, the list of failed projects is long, mainly because the complexity of undertaking such projects is often understated and the demands of a public value approach make e-government projects even more complex. Public value theory suggests that citizens value those services they authorise, whose creation they participate in and whose outcomes they relate to. This study seeks to understand how governments prioritise e-government initiatives in order to maximise public value. This study is based on an interpretive case study of an e-government program in Zimbabwe, a country in Southern Africa, consisting of a number of projects that have to be prioritised. Using public value theory as a theoretical lens, six interviews were conducted with senior managers involved in the program, complimented by a review of various project related documents and followed by a focus group of thirteen managers which was used to rank the relative importance of various criteria that relate to the delivery of public value. Using a prioritisation framework developed as part of this study, a mock prioritisation of a menu of projects was conducted and this was compared to the actual prioritisation that had beencarried out during the implementation of the program. The study finds that public managers believe that seeking public authorisation is undesirable, unnecessary and that governments are often ill equipped to undertake this task. Co-creation of services with the public is seen as desirable, mainly because government does not have the resources to undertake all the initiatives they have to and appear to welcome any assistance that is available. Public managers appear to struggle to relate the projects they undertake to outcomes that citizens relate to, but seem to be focussed on more immediate measures, a likely throwback to new public management thinking. The study concludes that the lack of citizen participation in project conceptualisation and service creation and delivery can be overcome by the use of more and more commonly available technologies such as social media and the increasing proliferation of the internet even in fairly remote parts of Africa to not only better understand citizen priorities but to engage the citizen in creating the services they consume and deliver on the outcomes they value.
Everywhere in the world governments consider the use of Information and Communication Technologie... more Everywhere in the world governments consider the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to drive improvements in service delivery with wide ranging e-government initiatives. The health sector in particular faces the twin challenge of growing populations requiring services and dwindling resources in the face of reduced funding. Yet developments in ICT present an opportunity to streamline service offering in a way that maxim-ises the available meagre resources. These e-Health initiatives require the input and the support of the public that health institutions serve. Design thinking has over the last twenty years developed into a " design paradigm " that can assist service providers to craft solutions to problems that take into account the needs and views of stakeholders involved. Using a design science research approach underpinned by a pragmatist philosophy, this study develops a model for consolidating empathy input in a design thinking process. The model was iteratively tested in a healthcare setting focusing on the provision of postnatal care services in a developing environment setting.
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Papers by Alex Marufu