The Behaviour Change Path

Social and Behaviour Change is a process to helping to ensure that positive change is more likely to happen. The process to DO behaviour change can be grouped into six general steps. Really. The path outlined below includes tools and materials to conduct each step.

Identify the problem, the target and the goal

Like the start of any journey, you will first need to put together a team from the community to help identify the specific problem behaviour you wish to change. You might look at secondary data or any relevant evidence to help inform your assessment. Together, you can identify who you will target for change, the resources you have available and those you will need and the challenges that need to be met.

Identify what's causing the problem

Next, you will look at the evidence and the expected outcomes to work out which factors are causing the problem. These are the deterinants of the poroblem. You then work out which factors are changeable and focus there. You would look at ways that people you work with prefer to communicate or receive information (radio, household visits, billboards, etc). You also look at who or what the influencers are for that community, what things help people to accept the suggested changes (called enablers) and what things might discourage people from making change (called disablers).
All this information is incredibly helpful to ensuring you come up with the right activity for positive change.

Design plan of action

Now, we need a plan of action. Here we identify
a) At which levels of the SEM will we work (with individuals? With households or friend groups? With the community? Through our organisation?)
b) With whom will we specifically work? Who specifically from our team will work with each of the SEM levels?
c) When will each activity or intervention take place?

With these questions in mind, we choose specific evidence-based methods and discuss with our community team to ensure that they will be well-received. We then select the ways you can practically deliver the interventions.

Prepare, test and refine

It's time to try out your plan. We prepare the materials needed, the right messages (and delivery methods - like games, cards, videos) and start pretesting, refining and finalizing the content to the specific contexts wherte you are working.

Let's go!