Author: Sarah Osman

Over the years that I have been working with organisations on designing and implementing social and behaviour change (SBC) projects, I have seen many variations of how to put together a team that will design an impactful SBC project. When I zoomed into the ways in which successful projects are similar, I found the common denominator to be a well put-together core design and implementation team. These teams contain seven key functions.

The application of an SBCC approach to the design of information campaigns for Afghan migrants travelling through irregular routes was a novel approach. We would like to offer some reflections and lessons learnt that may help in growing the field of integrating a behavioural science lens to the design of information campaigns.

I attended the long-awaited International Social and Behaviour Change Communication (SBCC) Summit in Marrakesh from 5-9 December. It was so good to finally meet so many clients and collaborators in person, and to make connections with like-minded behavioural science fanatics!

For most projects, I recommend conducting or commissioning a literature review before anything else. It’s an efficient and cost-effective way to help you focus your intervention design, or plan further formative research if it turns out that that is necessary. The challenge though is what to do once that 50-page report is ready!

Recently, I was confronted with an interesting question: what evidence do we have that programme intervention design is best served by using a theory? Do we have concrete data and evidence that using theory leads to more effective interventions? In my quest for a decent response, I realised that the question isn’t so much why interventions should be informed by theory, but rather, how they should be informed by theory.

Modelling is an interesting behaviour change method to understand because it seems that the scale of interventions that can be designed using it can make it very cost-effective, for example, due to the number of potential viewers of a film whose behaviour could be influenced. To help NGO practitioners take full advantage of modelling as a behaviour change method, this post provides an overview of its theoretical underpinnings and the conditions that make it work.

Since 2000, 21 sub-Saharan African countries have reformed their penal codes or passed laws to expand the legal grounds for abortion (Bankole et al, 2020). This is a tremendous achievement which has had and will continue to have an immensely positive impact on African women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR).

According to the leading evaluation resource, Better Evaluation, “evaluation, in its broadest sense, refers to any systematic process to judge merit, worth or significance by combining evidence and values”. One way in which many evaluations can be made more informative and user-friendly would be to incorporate behavioural international design frameworks as a way of assessing the extent to which an intervention truly made a difference in a community.

Fidelity of implementation is the degree to which an intervention is carried out the way it was designed. Monitoring implementation fidelity, though a crucial part of an intervention, is often ignored. Without monitoring fidelity, we can’t really say with any certainty whether interventions work or not.

Inoculation Theory postulates that attitudes can be inoculated against persuasive attacks by building the ‘cognitive immune system’, the same way that one can build biological immunity. Similarly to a biological vaccination, this psychological vaccination can be brought about by exposing individuals to a persuasive message that contains weakened versions of the argument.