How Our Project Participants Are Planning and Managing Their 5-year, $45m Behavior Change Program

Abstract for a Comm Talk from the 2022 International SBCC Summit in Morocco:

"Social behavior change programming often comes with many of its key aspects controlled by project implementers and, indirectly, donors. This happens despite a rhetoric of the importance of community participation, inclusive processes, and the engagement of marginalized groups. This talk recounts how project participants in Madagascar took responsibility for the selection, planning, barrier analysis, monitoring and sustainability of all their behavior change objectives in a USD 45M food security program. The motto for our SBCC approach was: "Never do anything for the participants which we believe they can do, or learn to do, for themselves". For example, barrier analysis is usually carried out by external consultants who organize focus group discussions around pre-determined behavior change goals, analyze the data and then make recommendations for the program to implement. 

This talk illustrates a radically different approach. It shows the high degree of empowerment and sustainability achieved by supporting participants to run and manage all the key stages themselves. Most importantly, it shows that the most vulnerable, socially and economically marginalized people, even with no formal education, can carry out the work that agency staff or hired consultants normally consider their own domain of expertise. Such professional monopolization is a form of elite capture, and we must challenge the institutional norms that permit it. The talk will provide examples of simple techniques for enabling participants to manage their SBCC activities. And it will advocate this participative SBCC approach as a key tool in redressing the imbalance of power within relations of development."