About GAIN
GAIN is a Swiss-based foundation dedicated to addressing malnutrition worldwide, with a mission of improving diets for all, especially the most vulnerable, by increasing the availability, affordability, desirability, and sustainability of nutritious foods.
GAIN believes that Human-Centered Design approaches, particularly participatory methods that amplify beneficiary voices, are essential for ensuring that social protection programs meet the specific nutritional needs of households and communities. To support this, GAIN developed a comprehensive toolkit to guide the implementation of HCD in social protection initiatives.
As part of testing this toolkit in real-world scenarios, GAIN explored how HCD could enhance the nutritional value of school feeding programs by incorporating locally-sourced dairy.
Collaborative and participatory from the start
Derz facilitated a series of collaborative working sessions with GAIN and its partners, including SNV, the World Food Programme, the Ethiopian School Meal Initiative, and the Ministry of Education. These sessions were genuinely co-creative: partners were engaged from the outset in identifying the design question, developing learning objectives, and uncovering opportunity areas.
Derz's role included planning and facilitating sessions, conducting interviews, mapping existing systems, generating ideas, and developing low-fidelity prototypes for testing. These prototypes were refined with input from school and woreda administrations, parent-teacher associations, and other relevant stakeholders. An early testing round was also conducted in a dedicated workshop with school and woreda administrators.
The project resulted in a decision-making guide tailored for school administrators, a tool that helps schools identify contextual and viable models for integrating dairy into existing school feeding programs. The guide will initially be used to support decision-making and provide an implementation checklist.
The project was handed over to the GAIN team, who is preparing to test a high-fidelity prototype in selected schools during the 2024/25 academic year.