Social behaviour change: our learning journey

Designing accessible social behaviour change campaigns

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Sightsavers’ Ascend West and Central Africa programme rapidly adapted its neglected tropical disease (NTD) activities towards reducing the transmission of COVID-19 in 11 countries. In the absence of a vaccine, the only way we had to stop the disease from spreading was to change people’s behaviours.

We developed a communications campaign to influence behaviours that would prevent COVID-19, together with creative agency M&C Saatchi World Services and consortium partners. Some of the campaign and activities can be seen in this storymap.

We created a learning brief that described how we made this SBC campaign more accessible for people with disabilities. This led to a set of recommendations for our SBC work, which included:

• Create a shared understanding among all stakeholders on what accessibility and inclusion mean early in the project design.
• Embed universal design throughout the project cycle, and frame inclusion and accessible design of SBC around the needs of the target audiences.
• Work with different national ministries to encourage dialogue, foster better decision-making, and ensure that inclusion and the accessibility of SBC are given a high priority. Provide practical examples to emphasise why the inclusive and accessible design of behaviour change is important for the people it intends to reach.
• Foster connections with national organisations and/or community groups that represent target audiences, for example organisations of people with disabilities (OPDs). Promote meaningful participation and feedback loops during project planning, creative design and monitoring change.  This could include asking people with disabilities about how usable and understandable they find our communication materials and activities.
• Allow sufficient time and budget for inclusion and accessibility. However, be willing to make compromises on what is feasible, based on the scope of the project, as well as the priorities and resource pressures of crucial stakeholders such as the Ministry of Health, commercial design companies and local partners.

Understanding stigma and discrimination

Sightsavers has gathered practical learning from a project in Uganda involving the economic empowerment of young people with disabilities. The project’s goal was to support young people to gain employable skills, as well as increasing their opportunities for employment and access to financial services.

We used a participatory process to develop behaviour change interventions. Our work focused on reducing stigma and discrimination faced by youth with disabilities and supporting them to act as equal economic actors and valued members of their community.

Sightsavers has also recently published a systematic review of the literature about disability-related stigma and discrimination in sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia. The recommendations from this review are significant for our SBC work as they show us the importance of:

• using social behaviour change frameworks, for example the behaviour change wheel, to more systematically analyse and influence negative behaviours and social norms which drive stigma and discrimination.
• conducting research at the outset of planning interventions to understand the context-specific drivers and manifestations of stigma. We need to use standardised tools and appropriate methods to measure stigma at the start of projects and at various points along the way, to show changes over time.
• involving people with disabilities and their representative organisations in all stages of design and implementation of interventions and research. This is not only the right thing to do but is also often associated with better results.

Developing an SBC community of practice and toolkit

All of this learning is shared, discussed and used by the SBC community of practice. This is a space for Sightsavers staff who are delivering projects or who are interested in SBC to come together, provide peer support, and exchange the learning, ideas and challenges that they are facing in their SBC work.

A group of staff from across the organisation have also been working together to develop an SBC toolkit. This will give Sightsavers staff the guidance and tools to better understand and influence the behaviours of people and communities we work with.

The toolkit is being developed to improve clarity, provide guidance on SBC, and will be used as a tool to increase our organisational capacity. It is strongly embedded in learning from across Sightsavers programmes and from good practice developed from across the social behaviour change sector.

We are moving forward with our social behaviour change priorities by gathering learning, sharing our experiences, and identifying ways to strengthen the quality and effectiveness of our SBC work.