A Think-and-Make Tank for Soul of Africa

Oxford Saïd School of Business + Nine Multi-disciplinary Designers.

Groups of business students, working with designers, tackled a brief investigating business aspects of the Soul of Africa charity, an organisation that employs widowed women in South Africa to hand-stitch shoes together, allowing them to earn a wage to take care of their children. The money from the shoes sold in the UK, US and Italy is then used by the charity to build schools and orphanages in South Africa.

The workshop paired Oxford business students with designers to spend a day evaluating the charity’s strategy, operations, and marketing endeavours, and collaborating on coming up with new solutions to existing problems. Areas included strategy, marketing & sales, and product design. Designers helped to facilitate a human-centered research approach to the brief.

Title image and logo credit: Soul of Africa