A Corporate Foundation
Helping Teen mothers in Mexico get back to learning and earning
Mexico has one of the highest incidence of teenage pregnancies in the world. According to a census in 2020, there were over five hundred thousand teenage mothers in the country. For a variety of reasons, most of these women end up not working and end up having very difficult lives as a result. Our client, a major corporate foundation, asked us to help design a solution to help these women change their perception around learning and earning.
Approach
As part of our research, we spoke with several young mothers, community workers, doctors, health workers and community organizations. We also did some deep, immersive research by staying with for a family of a teen mother in one of the neighbourhoods that is considered dangerous.
The research offered some powerful insights into their lives. Poverty in Mexico is not the same as poverty in India. The family had all the amenities inculding fridge, microwave, mobile phones and as a icing on cake, the government has provided free internet across the city. In addition, these people had a mindset that is very similar to rich people. They want to work at their own pace and don't want to get caught up in routines. Instead of compromising, they learn to live with the poverty.
We learned a great deal. That like most mothers worldwide, they wanted to be role models for their children but felt that they couldn’t do so if they didn’t have a steady job or couldn’t help them with their homework. Deep down they wanted to work. They just didn’t know where to start. We also learned that, surprisingly, there were resources in the community to help these women but they were mostly unaware of these resources and rarely took advantage of them. We saw this as an untapped opportunity and decided to focus our efforts on bridging this gap.
We asked three questions. First, how might we bring mothers into the funnel? Second, how might we engage the mothers once they come in? And finally, how might we move them into the path of learning or earning?
We knew that whatever we did would need to be scalable and fit into the women’s current way of doing things. After much deliberation, we settled on the idea of creating a social campaign to connect these women to each other for support and to help increase awareness about how to access and best leverage these resources. We reasoned that a peer network would be more influential than some heavy-handed traditional approach relying on external experts who may have limited to no credibility with this group.
Our MVP had a Facebook group and set of call to actions to create engagement. WE ran a targeted campaign both online as well as meeting mothers where they are in places such as health centres, tianguis, metro stations, schools, buses, parks and community centres.
200 mothers signed up using our QR code in 10 days and this involved ‘double clicks’ as a call to action. It gave us enough confidence that this campaign is desirable among young mothers and has the potential to evolve into a social movement.