Author Archives: Sarah Osman

Social and behaviour change (SBC) is an evidence-based, theory-driven process that identifies factors that influence people’s behaviour and addresses these by using approaches that are most likely to produce positive changes in behaviour. There is increasing recognition of how an SBC approach can benefit global development programme design. Incorporating a behavioural lens to development programming has been one of the reasons why we have been able to achieve difficult things like reducing HIV infection rates and increasing the number of people who use insecticide-treated bed nets, even if challenges still exist. Other sectors of global development like child protection, education and migration can also benefit from behavioural design. The key lies in the approach that is taken from the outset to designing projects. If a systematic, behavioural approach is followed, it is likely that the quality of the projects will be high.

If you are in the beginning of your journey to incorporate behavioural thinking into your project design, I will share some tips to help you along the way. Incorporating behavioural science does not have to be a taxing process and can be done with systems and tools that you already have at your disposal.  

Tip 1: Get the right people in the room.

When designing new projects, diverse perspectives are important. You will want colleagues who have worked with communities, government, service providers and in partnership with other civil society organisations. Additionally, it is crucial to have a subject matter expert in the room. It is always recommended to have a colleague with some understanding of behavioural science around. This could be the SBC advisor, the person who just completed a course in human-cantered design or someone who has worked on communication for development projects. If you do not have team members with this expertise, hire an applied behavioural scientist or SBC consultant from the outset. They will provide excellent direction on the overall approach of building your project. The team should not be too big – a maximum of six or seven people is ideal.

Tip 2: Mine your data and existing research for behavioural insights.

Most NGOs have a plethora of data that, with the right skillset, can be mined for behavioural insights. Some of the best documents to get information from include:

• Needs assessments for projects targeting the same groups and thematic areas.
• Recent stakeholder analyses.
• Routine monitoring and other project reports.
• Recent external or internal evaluations.

A key aspect is being able to match behavioural determinants with their theoretical construct equivalent. For example, survey questions asking about confidence or skill level in conducting a task will give insight on the degree of self-efficacy the target has in carrying out specific tasks. Questions around trust in service providers or infrastructure can give insight into structural barriers. Insights on cognitive biases can also be mined if you have information on who people seek information from most often (messenger effect).

The next step is to do a semi-systematic review of the literature to get information on what factors research has shown to be most salient in your area of interest. As far as possible, search for meta-analyses and reviews first before delving into individual studies. Third party data or datasets may also be available from resources such as the Demographic and Health Survey Programme. It is tempting to commission new research right away, but it is much more valuable to first take stock of all the information available to you, so that whatever research you commission next is focused on filling key knowledge gaps.

Tip 3: Use behaviour maps.

Before building your logical framework or results framework, get in the habit of using behaviour maps first. Behaviour maps are a conceptual representation of the steps that need to be taken to reach a desired goal or behaviour. They are a great tool to help you:

• Focus on key behaviours to change (at the individual, interpersonal, community or societal levels).
• Map out all the crucial steps an individual or a group of people have to take to reach the desired change.
• Identify at which point of the process your project is likely to have the most impact.

The Manoff Group offers an excellent guidance template on how to develop a behaviour map (they call it a ‘Behaviour Profile’). It also helps designers interrogate what has to happen around the person or group of people to facilitate the behaviour.

With your team in place, some key questions to ask are:

1. What is the exact behaviour you want the person/people to do?
2. What positive existing things do you want to promote?
3. What inhibits the behaviour?
4. What can you do about these inhibitors?
5. What are the empirically verified tactics you can use to influence the behavioural determinants?

Tip 4: Identify relevant theoretical frameworks and build a theory of change.

Once you have a good idea of what factors are influencing your behaviours of interest, you want to start building a model of how the determinants you identified work to influence the behaviour. The complexity of global development work means that you need to take a multi-theory approach, that is, no one theory will be able to sufficiently explain everything that is influencing the behaviour. For example, if you are designing a programme on how to engage parents to read more with their children, you may find relevant determinants from the Theory of Planned Behaviour, Learning Theory and Behavioural Economics. Once you land on the key determinants and understanding the theoretical parameters, you can build your theory of change and logic model. This will also make it easy for you to build your logical and results framework.

Tip 5: Plan for some form of testing.

A high-quality SBC project requires some form of pre-testing. Do this with whatever means are available to you. While randomised control trials are often viewed as the gold standard, they are not the only way to get good quality evidence for how and under what conditions your intervention works. A quasi-experimental design, such as some form of comparative effectiveness, where you compare how your target group who received the intervention compares with another group that is as similar as possible on a set of key criteria, and was not exposed to the intervention, is a widely accepted good quality approach. The World Bank for example applies quasi-experimental designs, which they call ‘nimble evaluations’. If this is too complex, then the standard qualitative and quantitative methods will do. The bottom line is, do not roll anything out without testing it first!

These five tips are central to the design of any good SBC project. Please check out my other articles for additional resources to help in your behavioural design journey and feel free to get in touch if you have questions!

Next week is the United Nations Behavioural Science Week! The United Nations (UN) Secretary General’s Guidance on Behavioural Science will be launched. This long-awaited document, along with a report on how 25 UN entities are applying behavioural science to help reach the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), will offer guidance on how a behavioural approach to development challenges is helping to deliver more innovative and effective solutions than traditional approaches.

One of the areas that has huge potential to benefit from behavioural science is information design in the context of irregular migration. The term irregular migration is “generally used to identify persons moving outside regular migration channels. The fact that they migrate irregularly does not relieve States from the obligation to protect their rights.” (International Organisation for Migration (IOM), 2021). It refers to the situation that a person finds themselves in as they move between borders.

Making migration safer is one of the key priority areas under the SDGs. SDG target 10.7 is to “facilitate orderly, safe, and responsible migration and mobility of people, including through implementation of planned and well-managed migration policies” (United Nations, 2020). One of the ways that governments and international organisations are trying to contribute to achieving target 10.7 is through information and awareness raising campaigns.  However, very few of these campaigns are designed from a behavioural perspective, and so they are not able to provide potential migrants with the information they need to move safely.

Migrants need access to high quality, tailored information. Several studies have shown that migrants often start their journeys with limited or biased information and thereby end up in vulnerable and life-threatening situations (Tjaden et al, 2018).  We also have little knowledge of what works: out of 60 publicly available evaluations of information campaigns (out of a total of 3,600 evaluations), the findings of two evaluations were published in peer-reviewed journals (Tjaden et al, 2018). The bar for designing these vitally important information campaigns is extremely low.

Large investments and weak outcomes

Information and awareness-raising campaigns for migrants or potential migrants are common. Campaigns vary in the target groups, types, formats, messages and strategies of such campaigns are also diverse. For example, across the European Union, over EUR 23 million has been devoted to information and awareness-raising campaigns to counter migrant smuggling since 2015 (European Commission, 2018).

Evaluations of awareness-raising and behaviour change interventions to minimise risks associated with irregular migration are limited. Furthermore, the reliability of the evaluations is limited too and often there is no description of a systematic approach used for the evaluation or the campaign (Tjaden et al, 2018).

Designing campaigns based on behavioural drivers

The behavioural literature that exists on migration decisions has shown that individuals’ risk perception and decision-making processes operate in a complex milieu of external and internal determinants, and a myriad of push/pull factors (Zimmerman et al, 2015).  The context (family, community, national and global) in which migrants find themselves is critically important to decision-making. Koser & Kuschminder (2016) offer a decision-making theory of how migrants in transit decide whether to move on or to return which further confirms the complexity of environmental factors affecting migrants’ decision-making processes.

Factors Determining Migrant Decision Making in Transit (Koser & Kuschminder, 2016)

For (potential) migrants, decision-making is happening in a continuous and dynamic manner. Their information needs change based on where they currently are, what is happening in their social networks and policy conditions. Deciding what to do next with such a complex mix of information inputs makes it our responsibility to design information in an accessible manner that helps (potential) migrants make the right decisions to keep themselves safe.

Successful behavioural approaches

More recently, there has been increased interest in applying behavioural science to design information and awareness raising campaigns to improve their quality. In 2019, IOM conducted the first randomised control trial of its Migrants as Messengers campaign in Senegal, which used videos featuring migrants’ stories about their journey. They compared groups who watched these videos (test group) with groups who did not (control group) and retested them six months later. They were able to increase knowledge, increase risk perception, decrease intention to migrate irregularly and change views about returnees (Dunsch et al, 2019).  Similar results were found in a study conducted in Nigeria where the researchers concluded that using targeted information campaigns improved the odds of risk protection among young people (Obi et al, 2019).

One of the most pioneering initiatives is IOM X. IOM X is IOM’s campaign to encourage safe migration and public action to stop exploitation and human trafficking. IOM X moves beyond raising awareness to affecting behaviour change. It applies a Communication for Development (C4D), evidence-based and participatory framework using the P-Process for campaign design and tailoring messaging for its activities. The website offers lots of resources and guidance on how to design behaviourally-informed campaigns that are of value to people on the move.

Lessons learnt from successful campaigns

Designing successful communication campaigns supporting migrants facing irregular circumstances is possible by using a tailored and behaviourally informed approach. According to Browne (2015) successful campaigns have the following characteristics:

• They are delivered by a trusted source;
• They are targeted to specific groups, with specific messages;
• They include testimonials from (returned) migrants;
• They are repeated and not delivered piecemeal or once-off; and
• They are integrated into broader migration policies and campaigns.

The Mixed Migration Centre (2020) surveyed Afghan returnees on their experiences before and after the journey,  and put forward two key recommendations when designing information campaigns:

• Information campaigns should target the wider community and actively include diaspora communities as key influencers of risk awareness and protection;
• As well as providing a realistic overview of potential risks en route and how to mitigate them, information campaigns should also include content on job opportunities, living conditions and asylum procedures in destination countries.

A key lesson from this research is that taking a behavioural approach will remind us to take the most fundamental and crucial step: ask our audiences what their experience has been and what information they needed.

The agendas of the different actors in the migration and development space vary, but ultimately, taking a behavioural approach to designing information campaigns is taking a human-rights based approach. We should be focusing on providing targeted information to (potential) migrants in all their diversity in a timely manner to help them stay safe along their journeys.

Browne, E. (2015). Impact of communication campaigns to deter irregular migration (GSDRC Helpdesk Research Report 1248). Birmingham, UK: GSDRC, University of Birmingham.

Dunsch, A. Tjaden, J. & Quiviger, W. (2019). Migrants as Messengers: The impact of Peer-to-Peer Communication on Potential Migrants in Senegal. Impact Evaluation Report (IOM Geneva, 2019).

European Commission (2018). European Commission contribution to the European Council, Managing migration in all its aspects: progress under the European Agenda on Migration.

European Migration Network (2019). Migration and communication: Information and Awareness-raising Campaigns in Countries of Origin and Transit Austrian National EMN Conference 2019 – Briefing paper

International Organization for Migration (2021). Key Migration Terms.

Koser, K. & Kuschminder, K. (2016). Understanding irregular migrants’ decision making factors in transit. Occassional Paper Series No. 21|2016. Maastricht University / UNU Merit.

Mixed Migration Centre (2020). The decision to migrate among Afghans: access to information and key influencers.

Obi, C., Bartolini, F., D’Haese, M. (2019). Evaluating the impact of information campaign in deterring irregular migration intention among youths. a randomised control experiment in Edo State, Nigeria. A paper submitted for presentation at the AAAE Conference, Abuja.

Tjaden, J., Morgenstern, S. & Laczko, F. (2018) Evaluating the Impact of Information Campaigns in the Field of Migration: A Systematic Review of the Evidence, and Practical Guidance. IOM Global Migration Data Analysis Centre: Central Mediterranean Route Thematic Report Series, Issue 1.

United Nations (2020) SDG Indicator 10.7.2. Department of Economic and Social Affairs.

Zimmerman C., McAlpine A. & Kiss L. (2015). Safer labour migration and community-based prevention of exploitation: The state of the evidence for programming. The Freedom Fund and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

What are social norms?

Put simply, social norms are social rules, created by people, that allow us to live and cooperate with each other. We need social norms. They help us to create societies and collaborate, predict each other’s behaviour, and be accepted in society.

People conform to social norms on the condition that they believe (a) most people in their reference network conform to a specific behaviour (empirical expectation), and (b) that most people in their reference network believe they ought to conform to the behaviour (normative expectation) (Bicchieri, 2006). Similarly, Cialdini et al (1991) distinguish between descriptive norms (beliefs about what others would do in a given situation), and injunctive norms (beliefs about what others would approve or disapprove of).

Social norms can be positive or negative. For example, in the context of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), they can be positive when communities promote autonomy over reproductive choices. They can be negative when there is acceptance of child marriage. SRHR organisations want to change negative social norms to allow communities to adopt new norms that produce positive SRHR outcomes.

Within SRHR interventions, social norms often come up as one of the main behavioural drivers for anything from youth access to contraception, condom use, child spacing and access to safe abortion.  They are often also the behavioural determinant that, if successfully changed, can lead to highly impactful SRHR outcomes, because of the potential for diffusion of adoption of new healthy behaviours.

While this article focuses on how projects have succeeded in transforming social norms, it is important to remember that it is still necessary to conduct thorough research on the full range of behavioural drivers of the SRHR topic one is addressing, to ensure that an evidence-based intervention is designed. Another important aspect to consider is that a behaviour can be driven by multiple social norms, and so working on only one may not be enough to effect change. Cislaghi & Heise (2018a) offer excellent guidance on how to avoid common pitfalls with regards to social norms intervention design.

Approach to transforming social norms

For organisations to work on social norms, it is important to understand that social norms change is a dynamic process and requires working at multiple levels. According to The Dynamic Framework For Social Change (DFSC), work needs to be done at the institutional, individual, social and material levels, while also taking into consideration the effects of gender dynamics and power structures, as well as forces at the global level. Cislaghi & Heise (2018b) offer good starting points on how to design a social norms focused intervention using the DFSC.

The Dynamic Framework For Social Change (Cislaghi & Heise (2018b)