FACT. Design thinking can solve Nigeria’s Biggest Problems.

I am a Proud Nigerian. I no go lie.

These words are what define me, my dreams and my vision for the future. It kind of boils down to one question: “What will I do for Nigeria?”

I am several miles away from home, working my ass off as an Entrepreneur-in-Training at MEST — MeltWater Entrepreneurial School of Technology, Ghana. We are being trained to build companies that will not only become billion-dollar companies but that will solve real problems here in Africa.

For the past three weeks, we’ve been learning the Principles of Design Thinking. This involves principles such as the non-linear process of empathy, defining, ideating, prototyping and testing. From the day I attended the first lecture, it struck a chord in me — .this is what I have been searching for my whole life!!

We just concluded a Design Thinking sprint, and my team tried to understand and solve a very simple question — “Is the hostel experience for university students in Ghana good? If not, how can we solve this problem?” I’ll share our design sprint journey in another post.

To be honest, I am in love with Design Thinking and it has got me thinking very hard. My country Nigeria isn’t in its best years currently. We have many issues abounding; high poverty rate, unemployment, crime, bad health systems, the widening gap between the poor and the rich, and bad leadership, to mention a few.

We can solve our problems by applying the principles of Design Thinking — this is a fact.

In the next couple of weeks, I will be sharing my growth and learning process around Design Thinking. I will also treat special issues we face in Nigeria and suggest how we might run Design Thinking experiments to solve these specific problems. It’s going to be a long ride, but if you stick with me, we could all become better design thinkers in the process.

The labor of our heroes past shall never be in vain….