About this innovation

Innovation Stats
Funding Goal ($): $1000000
Innovation Type: Approach
What phase of development is your innovation currently in?: Stage 6: Wide-scale Adoption
Potential Lives Impacted: 2000000
Actual Lives Impacted: 3000000
Potential Lives Saved: 2000000
Potential Lives Saved: 3000000
Cost Per Unit: $145000
Where did you create your innovation?: Tanzania
Where have you implemented your innovation?: Tanzania
In what sectors does your innovation belong?: Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance, Digital Development & Enabling Technologies, Economic Growth and Trade, Entrepreneurship, Education, Gender, Non-discrimination, Health and Wellbeing, Youth
Topic: Other

In The News

Provide a status update for your Innovation.
  1. Data Zetu (Our Data) - project which aims at empowering communities to make evidence based decisions to improve their lives. Through this project TBI fosters the use of data in art through Mural paintings, fashion, and Data lyrical music, media (TV and Radio Shows).
  2. Boresha Habari (Amplify News Reporting) - a program which aims to strengthen the capacity of media houses to promote development through media. TBI also run data-driven TV and radio shows in the program.
  3. Jua Katiba (Know your Constitution) - a governance-based program which involves several mainstream and online media platforms to deliver messages to the community on the Tanzanian constitution.
  4. Balozi wa Amani (Peace Ambassador) - a program that promotes the culture of peace amongst citizens to counter violence extremism. Program uses the power of community events such as training workshops, dialogues, arts and media to promote peaceful co-existence amongst the diversified communities in Tanzania.
  5. Mawazo Challenge (Ideation Challenge) - a program which empowers medical and allied sciences students with innovative skills, and help them to break the barriers by fully utilize their potentials to develop health innovative solutions that could potentially create impact in their own communities. The power of hakathons, boot camps, acceleration, incubation, seed funding and mentorship supports are utilized to empower the students with the opportunities.
  6. Serikali Yangu (My Government) - a citizen-centric program that aims to empower young Tanzanians to tackle unemployment challenge through entrepreneurship and business capacity building sessions.
How does your innovation work?

Our innovation approach uses 7 key areas to achieve its targets:

  1. Promote youth voices-  A calibre of bold, informed, confident and engaged youth ready to air issues that matters to them in creative and influential means that trigger broader conversation in their communities and the national level
  2. Partner with youth innovation- Support innovative ideas to develop practical solutions within the grassroots and the global innovation ecosystem
  3. Create youth friendly places- Develop platforms, encourage coalition and build spaces where knowledge, insights, research findings and experience is shared.
  4. Advance youth opportunities- Give purpose and dignity to youth livehood by supporting them to drive their own economic freedom through capacity building, resource mobilization and inspire business support environment. 
  5. Recognize youth leadership- Build a calibre of young leaders that serve as role models and inspire others to create sustainable innovative solutions to development challenges. 
  6. Support youth mentorship- Expose youth to inspirational personal growth and development and challenge them to live purposeful lives.
  7. Empower gender equality- Support better integration and involvement of both male and females students in the learning process and support girls education, development and participation in their communities. 
What Evidence do you have that your Innovation works?
  1. We have use cases that have been able to start initiative through our support, then sustain themselves beyond the lives of the funding periods of our program actions.
  2. Our tools and platforms are continously used by our beneficiries to get informed and engage in interactions with others on the governance and development matters.
Do you have current users or testers?

Yes we have. Most of our users and testers are the local communities members, and majority comes from the ICT, media and arts industries.

What is your strategy for expanding use of your innovation?

Our strategy to expand the use of our innovation involves building capacities of  different stakeholders such as government and non-state actors such as NGOs, CSOs and community groups, whereby, we transfer skills and tools knowledge for them to apply them in their programs and communicate their messaging for sustainable development. Also when we collaborate with these stakeholders, our team shares tools and best practices for the partners to apply them to impact the communities. We plan to make our innovation and expertise more accessible using both online and offline platforms for others to benefit  and easily access them.

Next Steps

The following is our strategy to grow our innovation:

  1. Continue designing and running innovation programs that embraces the power of combining community ground activities, arts and media, fashioned together to contribute towards sustainable development.
  2. Establishment of an Innovation Hub-  A vibrant, collaborative and creative innovation space for innovators to provide sustainable impacting solutions through partnership. The space will be female friendly and have special programs for them so as to encourage more young girls and women to join, connect, network and innovate using the space and its facilities. We are currently almost boarding into the candidate stage with Impact Hub Network.
  3. Establishment of an arts hub- A spcae where artists can learn, collaborate, showcase their talent and innovate. 
  4. Establishing a digital online media channel to share informative contents that will be used to spark national conversations on development matters. The platform will enable youths to access content of different issues from youth related agenda to data and information, and enable them to engage in discussions on the shared contents.
Additional Evidence Documentation
She Codes for Change (Innovation) Strategy1.98 MB
Related Resources
Innovation Toolkit Step1 Identify and Define Problem.pdf330.08 KB

USAID’s grant and prize competitions and open innovation programs engage a global community of innovators and solvers to apply science and technology to find high-potential innovations to overcome critical barriers to development challenges. These programs stand apart from other programs for their problem-set orientation, global scope and reach, and use of open innovation models for sourcing and accelerating innovations. These features create unique opportunities, challenges, and considerations for the design process and implementation approaches. Articulating a problem that inspires innovation is a critical first step in these programs because it constructs a solid foundation upon which to build the program objectives and make design choices. By defining the problem clearly and presenting the barriers based on evidence and research, USAID can galvanize a broader, more diverse community of solvers to develop innovative solutions and create new pathways to achieve impact on a grand scale.



This document will explain and offer guidance on the following activities:

• Assembling the Team. Begin with a lean team and build staff and resources as needed to ensure success of the program over the long term.

• Identifying the Problem. In the problem identification phase teams will identify, assess, define, and select the problem by conducting research, ideation workshops, and stakeholder engagement.

• Drafting the Concept Note. The Concept Note is the first articulation of the problem statement and is a critical document throughout the program design process.

• Conducting the Barrier Analysis. The Barrier Analysis is a research-based exercise that helps to validate and refine the problem statement by gathering evidence about the specific barriers that hamper progress.

• Finalizing the Challenge Statement.

Following these efforts, the team will draft a concise Challenge Statement that articulates the problem, the critical barriers that need to be overcome, and what the program hopes to achieve. 

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