YEAR
2025
AFFILIATION
ROLE
SECTOR
DISCIPLINES
SUMMARY
The research set out to find ways to use gamification in helping youth and children-on-the-move understand risks during migration in Latin America. (East Africa was briefly considered) It aims to address the gap between how risk information is delivered and how vulnerable youth process, anticipate, and act within complex migration contexts.
OUTCOMES
Ethnography • Alignment Workshop • Interviews + Focus Groups • User Research • Game Audit • White Paper • Recommendations Report
Specific insights and reports are under NDA
Snapshots from Recommendations Report
Challenge
BRIEF
Can we leverage gamification for Risk Mitigation among Children-on-the-Move during a polycrisis?
Given this context, the brief was to understand how IRC can scaffold conditions in which children and their families can make better decisions and mitigate risks before or during the migration journey, particularly using games as a tool.
Approach
My approach was to begin with grounding the research, through literature review, interviews with various regional teams, and mapping the context landscape. Alongside this, began auditing existing serious games. Through secondary and primary modes, play-tested and built a rubric based on needs, and relevance for this project.
Next, spent time surveying 30+ internal team members about their insights from the field, including device access and how they imagine a risk mitigation intervention may positively impact migrating youth. I went deeper into debriefing the findings through virtual stints. This was followed by brief-setting workshops for the regional teams in East Africa and Latin America.
The findings from this workshop led to narrowing the regional context to Latin America, and funneling insights. Around the same time, I also interviewed two serious games experts with track records in the humanitarian context. This helped in further narrow possible game strategies for the challenge.
These steps further refined the initial brief. The biggest difference was reframing games as gamified-learning moving past the initial assumption of only digital games. I advocated for this shift early on, since it changed the scope of what counted as a viable intervention.
The final turn in the research was the focus groups with migrating youth conducted in Colombia. I was responsible for designing the Youth FGD and collaborating with the local facilitators to create an effective strategy to collect information needed to supplement the findings.
This was a crucial step as it could validate the earlier insights and bring direct testimony through Youth Focus Groups at a transit point in the field. This step led to a synthesising phase which laid the foundation for how gamification might be utilised for risk mitigation.
All these activities informed the Recommendations Report which outlined the landscape, findings and methods to help move forward in this domain.
Research Process: From Brief to Reccommendations
LANDSCAPE RESEARCH
& DIRECTIONS
BRIEF
How can we leverage gamification for Risk Mitigation among Children on the Move?
⁰¹
Playtest games and create success rubric for game audit as there was a gap in impact studies for serious games in Humanitarian Contexts.
⁰²
Supplement existing serious games audit insights with theoretical knowledge from literature reviews
⁰³
Understand Context through internal team surveys and knowledge transfer, meet with local teams to understand vulnerabilities and risk behaviours.
⁰⁴
Funnel brief through insights from the research, objectives established and reframe the challenge as a project brief.
ALIGNMENT
& SYNTHESIS
With a working brief in place, I moved into alignment, running an internal team workshop and a survey with teams and partners to pressure-test the direction. In parallel, I conducted interviews with game experts to validate and expand the game design directions. This stage surfaced an important tension: the initial framing was too narrow in scope, which became a key input for reshaping the project going forward.
⁰¹
Brief Setting Workshops
⁰²
Team and Partner Surveys
⁰³
Serious Game Expert Interviews
Developed unique combination of mixed methods study to create research-backed, design-thinking and behavioral science informed recommendations.
⁰¹
Scale with Evidence: Building digital tools based on field insights to improve relevance and reduce risk.This approach proposed a two-stage intervention:
⁰²
Prototype as Ethnography: Use low-cost activities to understand behaviors, risks, and needs.
⁰³
Play-test in Context: Using the shelter environment to not only test developing concepts but also use the sessions as a way to create awareness of the challenge at hand.
EVALUATION
& IMPACT
CORE FINDING
Low-tech, high-risk environments require context-first design. Access, trust, facilitation, and local conditions shaped success more than digital complexity. The opportunity was adaptable game-based methods, not a standalone game.
CHANGE
Research informed the design brief, Theory of Change, and game design principles. Shift from digital games to game-based-learning. Findings shaped how facilitators may be treated as domain-experts rather than informants.
IMPACT
While this research was a first step, it shifted how the team scopes game-based interventions, prioritizing field-informed prototyping over upfront design. It also gave the team a validated direction and methods for testing gamified interventions before committing further resources.
A collection of outcomes, from an audit to methods.
impact
