Adrienne Leon, MPP 2027, spent her summer as a WAPPP Cultural Bridge Fellow in Nairobi at ZanaAfrica, a nonprofit organization focused on expanding youth education and access around menstrual health, reproductive rights, and life skills programming. Through her internship and experiences with colleagues, Adrienne developed a more collaborative and less U.S.-centric lens for her work in development.
Over the summer, she was primarily working to develop and refine a theory of change document for ZanaAfrica, based on conversations with leadership and employees.
A defining characteristic of the organization was the importance of co-creating and incorporating feedback from an intended audience or user group, Adrienne noted. ZanaAfrica’s ‘Nia Teen’ magazines and comic books, for instance, are shaped by feedback from the girls who read them.
Working on ZanaAfrica’s theory of change, Adrienne herself adopted the principle of co-creation with her colleagues, which also served as a learning opportunity for her.
“When I presented the document to the team implementing the work, there was a lot of pushback…many people could not see their work reflected in what I had developed. Because this is an organization that treats co-creation as non-negotiable, I took the feedback I received and started fresh. We went back to it, and then went back again, and again, and again. What came out of that process is something people feel proud of. It is useful to the people who have to use it because they are the ones who helped write it.”
She added that, beyond this specific project, conversations throughout the summer with her internship supervisor “made me think hard about my intentions in development work and the language I use.”
“My time at ZanaAfrica has already shaped the kind of work I want to do in my career: making sure I bring co-creation, intention, and context to everything I do.”
Her experience in Kenya also exposed her to the disparity between the impact of U.S. policy on people around the world, and the knowledge or understanding of these people’s lives in the U.S. She attended a menstrual hygiene event that had previously been supported by USAID, but since its dismantling the event was “a fraction of what it used to be” and had also lost corporate support. She also learned about potential Ebola quarantine centers to be set up in Kenya for Americans exposed to the virus, though there were no Ebola cases in Kenya and this would increase risk for Kenyans without giving them access to the premium treatment in the centers if there was an outbreak.
She wrote: “Kenyans, and other countries around the world, closely follow US politics and policy because America's decisions ripple through their economy and country. Meanwhile, most Americans know almost nothing about Kenya beyond occasional headlines. It feels like a stark asymmetry of attention and awareness.”
This experience, combined with her newfound appreciation for co-creation, had a lasting impact on Adrienne as she ended her internship. She wrote in her final blog post that she plans to take lessons from the summer and apply them to her work at HKS and beyond.
“My time at ZanaAfrica has already shaped the kind of work I want to do in my career: making sure I bring co-creation, intention, and context to everything I do.
