More about Christabel and the Billion Girls CoLab

About Christabel!

We’re really excited to be working again with Christabel Netondo, who has been an active member of HCDExchange! As a Fellowship Coordinator for the Billion Girls CoLab, Christabel works directly with the fellows from recruitment to providing mentorship and training–she acts as the liaison between them, grassroots partners, and design teams.

Prior to IDEO.org, Christabel worked as the Learning and Knowledge Management Coordinator at KPMG East Africa where she supported market intelligence for donor-funded accounts. Previously, she interned at inSupplyHealth/HCDExchange in the implementation of sexual and reproductive health gaming intervention. She has worked extensively as a youth implementer, trainer, and programmer of positive youth development agenda for programs working towards education, sustainability, and adolescent health globally.

Passionate about the role of young people in development, she has supported consultancy projects for UNICEF’s Youth Advocacy Guide adaptation, USAID’s Youth Engagement Community of Practice as a Youth Advisor to advance evidence-based best practices on youth programming, and Global Partnership for Education training support on effective youth participation to the global secretariat.

On top of all that - Christabel is a YALI East Africa Fellow 2020 and African Changemakers Fellow 2018.

About IDEO.org’s Billion Girls CoLab!

The Billion Girls CoLab is an incubator for girl-led solutions in community. The CoLab engages young women (19-24 years) in processes and outcomes by valuing their lived SRH experiences in order to shape, co-design process with and for them. Through a Femme Fellowship, they train girls to be human-centred designers in their own communities, to imagine and build towards the futures they desire. They also hold sprints and hackathons for girls to share their big ideas.

Learn more about their work here:

Practices of Billion Girls Co-Lab co-design journey with young women in the Kipepeo Fellowship Program in the first month of engagement.- as presented by Christine Netondo

  • We formalize our engagement with them through a 4 months paid contractual agreement to consent for their involvement
  • Facilitate their monthly data to help them seamlessly join our virtual weekly sessions
  • Orient and align with them on their roles & responsibilities
  • Co-create their 4-months fellowship growth plan to enable them identify components of the fellowship program that would be of most value to them beyond the fellowship duration
  • Collaboratively define their SWOT analysis to help us adults (BGC’s Senior Program Lead & Community Engagement Corodinator) to understand their backgrounds, strengths, weakpoints and aspirations
  • Guide them on how to use virtual collaborative tools that would be of essence during design sprint and engagement with CBO partners i.e basic Google Suite
  • Define channels of communication that would be most relevant to them i.e whatsap for prompt communication, updates and light moments, emails for program deliverables