Thought Series Second Edition — 5. Inclusive Behaviour Change

Dr. Manyani began the webinar with a brief overview on behaviour change and why it is needed for social inclusion. Dr. Ganguly was the first panelist to take the stage, talking about how communication campaigns play an important role in inclusive behaviour change. She first highlighted how behaviour is a complex and complicated issue and how hard it is to change people’s behaviour. She stated that change should be sustainable, not a temporary change. Dr. Ganguly gave insights from her past experiences on this issue, including mass media, mid-media, and interpersonal communications. After that, she answered the question, “Why are social and behaviour change communication campaigns important in a project?” While acknowledging there are many reasons, Dr. Ganguly highlighted two important examples relating to communication campaigns. First was the 360-degree approach, which simply means that hearing the same message from different channels makes people think about an issue. Second was how to make a campaign inclusive, because different people may have access to different channels and resources. She explained the importance of knowing and understanding the needs of people and how to create messages that respond to these needs and motivate them at different levels. The individual level increases knowledge and efficiency; the household level increases interpersonal communication; and this leads to the final level, which is behavioural change in communities and society in general that becomes entrenched as social norms. Dr. Ganguly lastly mentioned that the main thing is connecting people.

Kanika Joshi followed next by taking a technological approach to this issue, presenting the role of ICT in inclusive behaviour change. She began by explaining how and why it is important to use ICT in communication and how it can be the main driver for social behaviour change. After that, Kanika talked about the relationships and mechanisms ICT utilises in inclusion and behaviour change. Then she showed how some indicators of behavior in the ICT world can be explained through concepts such as choice overload, limited attention, social norms, identity, loss aversion, and the planning fallacy, using case studies from the Dominican Republic, India, and Philippines. These case studies were to understand if the rule of thumbs can foster behavioural change with peri-urban women entrepreneurs by performing a comparison between classroom training and visual aids. Kanika outlined the research and its methodology and showed how the outcomes of using ICT in training were a decrease in costs and an increase in practices and listenership. She summed up the case study as teaching us that making content easy and localized instead of instructive makes people understand the message much more. Kanika ended her presentation by mentioning that ICT is already playing a pivotal role in ensuring behavioural change and that its importance will only increase.

The last panelist, Dr. Kaleab Haile, introduced a different perspective in the form of an environmental approach, presenting a talk on the nexus between behaviour change and climate risks. He used the case study of South Saharan Africa and gave a brief overview of the area, highlighting its dependence on agriculture, which is highly dependent on weather and other external factors, and how this affects social behaviour. He diagrammatically outlined the relationship between climate risks and social behaviour, explaining that climate risks have an effect on the income of a household and, hence, if household members have no access to credit and similar kinds of resources, they will change the intrahousehold allocation of funds with respect to expenditures like education and food. Dr. Haile then touched upon how social behaviour interacts with income, illustrating how low incomes affects farmers’ behaviour as they will tend to take no risks, resulting in further low-income yields and creating a cycle of poverty. Lastly, as a framework, Dr. Haile highlighted that poor farmers would choose unfeasible climate change adaptations and mitigations, causing farmers tol become poorer in the long run and possibly losing their ability to continue sustainable production as a source of income.

The webinar came to an end with a question and answer session in which panelists found a chance to share more of their knowledge and experience. This webinar focused attention on one of the most important elements of social inclusion — inclusive behaviour change — by delving into its different perspectives and aspects.

Thank you (in no particular order) Liya, Eunice, Rebecca, Kanika, Deniz, Yeabtsega for organising the session in all!

Includovate is a feminist research incubator that “walks the talk”. Includovate is an Australian social enterprise consisting of a consulting firm and research incubator that designs solutions for gender equality and social inclusion. Its mission is to incubate transformative and inclusive solutions for measuring, studying, and changing discriminatory norms that lead to poverty, inequality, and injustice. To know more about us at Includovate, follow our social media: @includovate, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram.