Creative Capacity Building workshop underway in anticipation of the PIA 2018 Co-Design Summit in Morocco

MIT D-Lab Founding Director Amy Smith (front center) leading a session for the Creative Capacity Building training in Laâyoune, Morocco.
MIT D-Lab Founding Director Amy Smith (front center) leading a session for the Creative Capacity Building training in Laâyoune, Morocco.

Members of the MIT D-Lab team are currently in Laâyoune, Morocco leading a Creative Capacity Building (CCB) training for participants before the upcoming Practical Impact Alliance Co-Design Summit in November. The three-week training comprises an introductory CCB workshop (Oct 15-19), a Training of Trainers (Oct 22-26) and a practice CCB workshop (Oct 29- Nov 2) to coach the newly trained trainers in teaching the CCB methodology. This training aims to prepare the summit participants in the D-Lab participatory design method, and to build the capacity of the local institutions to integrate the CCB methodology and pedagogy in their training practice.

D-Lab Founding Director Amy Smith is leading the training, combining classroom instruction with hands-on exercises to solidify the practical side of the sessions. The first week of the training benefited 15 aspiring entrepreneurs and 12 trainers from the southern regions of Morocco. After discussing different ideas for possible projects, the participants split into teams to work on four projects: household waste sorting, portable solar cookers for nomads, grocery carrying products, and litter prevention. By the third day of the training, the teams had already moved on to modeling their solutions and to building, testing, and refining their prototypes.

The D-Lab team is very excited with the progress that the participants are making, and they are looking forward to leveraging the learnings from this training to adapt and the curriculum of the Co-Design Summit next month. In all, it’s been a great week so far for the D-Lab team in Morocco, where they have been building local capacity but also friendships and new members of the D-Lab global community.

The 2018 Practical Impact Alliance Co-Design Summit, co-hosted by the Phosboucraa Foundation, hopes to catalyze local innovation and entrepreneurship in the southern regions of Morocco.