Craig Kielburger's Free The Children

Craig Kielburger, founder of “Free the Children” tries to incorporate design thinking in his approach to breaking the cycle of poverty and ending exploitation of children in the developing world. Indeed, when tackling this complex problem, he adopts the point of view of local children and calls for developing a deep understanding of unmeet needs in each village, thus avoiding the pitfall of imposing the wrong solution on a community. His approach is shaped in 3 fundamental phases that overlap each other: inspiration, ideation and implementation.

His process of design starts with curiosity and inspiration, gathering hundreds of data points on the issue, by observing and talking to every stakeholder involved. In fact, before starting any projects, Craig spends a few weeks in villages, getting to know the whole community and gathering information on the habits, the culture, the relationships between actors, the laws, the barriers, that shape the way of living in each community. This inspiration phase is crucial in getting a deep understanding of local customs and will shape the next two phases: ideation and implementation.

Here is an example of what best illustrates the ideation and implementation phases that Craig used: weeks after weeks he generated, developed, and tested lots of …show more content…
He thus started building schools. However, Craig realized this strategy was no so efficient because none of the girls were going to school. He later learned that often, girls did not attend school at all, in part because they had to fetch water for their families. So Free The Children began building water wells near schools, allowing girls to get an education and go home at the end of the day with the family’s water. Later, teachers also shared that if children were not healthy they missed school, or showed up but were too sick to pay attention. So health care programming was