Very excited to introduce the facilitators for this Thursday’s session!
Wanja Gitau, Practice Lead (Capability, Development and Brokering)
Wanja leads ThinkPlace Kenya’s Capability Development and Brokering practice, a unit dedicated to building design capabilities in organizations by supporting the adoption of design-led strategies. She is an experienced design facilitator with 5yrs of extensive experience in facilitating highly engaging multi-stakeholder engagements and running design and strategy sprints with global and local stakeholders.
She is a self-starter who approaches design with curiosity and humility to look at problems with a design lens. She has extensive experience in design thinking and has been delivering exceptional capability development programs for partners including several HCD toolkits. Wanja is currently leading a maternal and newborn health project funded by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation aimed at redesigning service delivery to improve maternal and newborn health outcomes in Kenya.
Wanja holds extensive experience in product, service, and systems design, having worked on several projects that assist in building smooth and streamlined user journeys and design briefs that result in user-centric products and services in the private and NGO sectors. Currently, Wanja serves as an advisory committee member for HCDExchange, chairing the Strategy, Positioning and Investment subcommittee.
Oliver Muchiri, Senior Designer
Oliver is a Senior Strategic Designer at ThinkPlace and leads the Service Design & Systems Strengthening practice. His passion lies in mastering design in complex systems, to deliver tangible value. What excites him most is how to design well with people: to get the process right, to get the right outcomes, anchored to the real world, people and all their complexity.
Previously, Oliver worked as a business and tax consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers for 4 years where he gained extensive experience working with both Kenyan and global blue-chip companies across a diverse range of business sectors including financial services, infrastructure development, energy, telecommunication and consumer goods/services sectors. Whilst at PwC, Oliver contributed to various business emerging topics such as the Voluntary Disclosure Programme
At ThinkPlace, Oliver leads some of the company’s most significant projects given his background and experience. In Malawi, he helped establish novel community labs that the people of Malawi are now using to solve some of their country’s most complex community problems. Currently Oliver is working to help one of our client’s conduct detailed market research for a novel product in both Kenya and Senegal. Additionally, Oliver is working on a project that seeks identify and design around the barriers that exist when reaching Zero Dose Children and missed communities in the HORN of Africa.
