Sylvia was our cultural translator and on the ground recruiter / researcher (aka "fixer") in Ghana for an IDEO project with a fortune 500 client. Sylvia took an intentionally vague design research brief, understood and re-interpreted our research goals into a Ghana-specific research plan. We worked with Sylvia for several months to build our Ghana recruit and refine our Ghana-specific research plan together. As we were working remotely, she was able to work with us both on zoom, and async, and was very accommodating with her working hours to help us bridge the time zone gap (we were working across 5 different time zones!). Sylvia was unafraid to share her cultural perspective on how our research themes showed up, and use that to inspire different avenues for the team to learn. She crafted and led a 3-hour presentation with our design team and client on Ghana and various trends within the country as they relate to our research, which left our client deeply inspired, and later informed a lot of our design work. We were grateful to have Sylvia not just as a contractor, but as a true collaborator in our design research process and look forward to reaching out to her again the next time we find ourselves conducting research in Ghana. We were doing remote research in Ghana to learn both from the deep expertise in the country through expert interviews (that Sylvia led a masterful recruit on) as well as from the cultural nuance and history that we used to inform various perspectives on our work. Sylvia took an intentionally vague design research brief, understood and re-interpreted our research goals into a Ghana-specific research plan. We worked with Sylvia for several months to build our Ghana recruit and refine our Ghana-specific research plan together. As we were working remotely, she was able to work with us both on zoom, and async, and was very accommodating with her working hours to help us bridge the time zone gap (we were working across 5 different time zones!). Sylvia was unafraid to share her cultural perspective on how our research themes showed up, and use that to inspire different avenues for the team to learn. She crafted and led a 3-hour presentation with our design team and client on Ghana and various trends within the country as they relate to our research, which left our client deeply inspired, and later informed a lot of our design work. We were grateful to have Sylvia not just as a contractor, but as a true collaborator in our design research process and look forward to reaching out to her again the next time we find ourselves conducting research in Ghana.