Strategic Design & Social Innovation
Programme strategy, service models and innovation portfolios for organisations that need to move from intention to something people actually use.
Human-Centered Design · Senegal
We blend Human-Centered Design, social innovation and strategy to build solutions that genuinely transform communities and organisations.
We don't need training. We need someone to listen first.
Cooperative leader, RwandaThe form is in English. Our members speak Kiswahili.
Facilitator, KenyaIf it survives the rainy season, it works.
Farmer, CasamanceMake it run on the phone she already owns.
Field note, GhanaWe know our rights. What we don't know is where to go when they are broken.
Partner workshop, DakarEvery brief starts with listening, on site, in the local language.
The people who live the problem sit at the design table, not in the appendix.
We hand over tools, skills and evidence, not a deck nobody opens twice.
Twelve years of field practice, from Dakar to Bamako to Conakry.
About us
LaMission is a Human-Centered Design and social innovation studio based in Senegal, working across Africa on gender, climate, governance and rights.
We were built by practitioners who got tired of programmes designed in capitals for people nobody had met. So we start on the ground: in courtyards, market stalls, cooperative meetings and clinic waiting rooms. Then we bring that evidence back to the table where decisions get made, and stay until something works.
Twelve years, twelve countries, and one stubborn conviction: the best solution is almost always already half-formed in the mind of the person living the problem.
Our methodology
Four phases. Each one ends with something tangible you can hold, argue with, and take into the next room.
We spend time where the problem actually lives. Household interviews, shadowing, community mapping and listening sessions run in the language people think in, not the one the report is written in.
What you walk away with
Services
Programme strategy, service models and innovation portfolios for organisations that need to move from intention to something people actually use.
Qualitative and mixed-method research across Africa: baselines, needs assessments, gender and inclusion diagnostics, evaluation studies.
Multi-stakeholder sessions that produce decisions, not flipcharts.
Products and services designed for real bandwidth, real devices, real literacy.
Human-Centered Design, facilitation and leadership practice transferred to your own teams.
Training
We teach the methods we use in the field, in French or English, in Dakar or in your own offices. Small cohorts, real cases, and tools you leave with.
The full cycle in three days: framing a real brief, listening properly, turning findings into concepts, and testing them before you spend a budget.
How to ask questions that don't lead the answer, work with interpreters, take usable notes, and turn 40 interviews into an argument your board can act on.
Designing and running sessions where communities, staff and decision-makers build something together, including when the room disagrees.
Every course is delivered in French or English, and can be adapted to your sector, your programme cycle and your team's level.
Featured impact
Field capitalisation and service redesign for a women's entrepreneurship programme across three rural departments.
women co-designed the new support model
Diagnostics and facilitation tools helping mining-affected communities negotiate with operators on equal footing.
community platforms equipped and active
A low-bandwidth advisory service for smallholders, prototyped over two seasons and handed to a local operator.
from first field visit to live pilot
What people say
They arrived without a template. Three weeks in the field later, they showed us a version of our own programme we had never seen, and it was the honest one.
Regional development agency
Let's begin
Tell us what you're wrestling with. We'll come back within two working days with a first read and a suggested way in.
Name, email and a short brief are enough to start.