Designing for Mindset Shifts: Persona Mapping from the Field
A tool to understand Anganwadi worker mindsets and design targeted interventions that support meaningful change.
Over the past few years, we’ve been speaking with Anganwadi workers; listening closely to their stories, beliefs, and everyday decisions about young children’s education and aspirations. As frontline workers, they hold immense influence over what families believe and what children begin to imagine for themselves. But to support meaningful change, we must first understand how they think. That’s how this Persona Tool was born.
🎯 What is this tool?
This is a set of four persona types, each representing some common mindsets among Anganwadi workers when it comes to gender biases early childhood. These are not fixed labels. They are snapshots, rooted in what we heard and saw during our fieldwork.
🔍 How can you use it?
This tool can help teams who are:
Designing content or training for Anganwadi workers
Planning behaviour change interventions for early childhood settings
Building monitoring and evaluation frameworks to capture shifts in mindset
It helps you ask: Who are we designing for? What would it take to help someone move one step forward? What kind of mindset shifts can we realistically expect from our audience?
For example: A behaviour change campaign that highlights how a lack of support can limit girls’ futures may resonate with a Quiet Reinforcer; who may believe in fairness but hasn’t yet deeply reflected on it. However, the same message may not be enough to shift a Traditionalist, who might require more practical incentives such as showing how educating girls can reduce future household burdens or improve family well-being.
🛠️ How we’re using it (so far):
We’ve used this tool to:
Analyse our surveys to identify where our target audience falls along the spectrum
Reflect on what holds each persona back, and what “progress” might look like from one stage to the next
Plan targeted interventions and nudges tailored to specific mindsets
📚 Where this came from:
This tool is grounded in our field research including interviews and observation studies conducted across multiple states. While we didn’t set out to categorise people, over time we saw patterns in what we heard. Our goal has been to capture some of those patterns in the form of an actionable tool that can help our team design focussed interventions.
Below are some quotes from our research, tagged by persona, to offer a deeper understanding of each mindset.