September 17, 2016 – Ashesi’s D:Lab joined a network of universities, agencies and local communities all over the world, in hosting the first ever Global Goals Jam. Hosted at the Norton-Motulsky hall, the session attracted members of the Ashesi community, students from Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology and other tertiary institutions.
During the 2015 Social Good Summit, where world leaders adopted the Sustainable Development Goals, the United Nations Development Programme and MediaLAB Amsterdam launched the Global Goals Jam. At the Global Goals Jam, participants come together to design interventions towards tangible results in short sprints.
The session at Ashesi focused on three of the 17 goals, namely; affordable and clean energy, sustainable cities and development and, responsible consumption and production. “For the jams, we created challenges for the goals we chose, and worked towards creating actionable solutions,” said Theodore Philip Asare ’15, Design Thinking Coordinator at the D:Lab. “The D:Lab effectively identifies problems and attempts to solve them using design thinking, so the Jams was a great platform to hop on to help propose solutions to real problems that are going on in Africa and the world.”
Ashesi’s D:Lab is a space for members of the community to work on creative solutions to problems outside the classroom, using design thinking. “Looking forward, what we are hoping to do is to take these projects the D:Lab is currently working on, and perfect their solutions through initiatives like the Global Jams,” explained Carl Agbenyega ’15, Design Making Coordinator at the D:Lab. “So we will work with the team members of these projects to actively pursue these solutions to implement them in a more realistic way.”