Multi-Sectoral Nutrition Strategy 2014-2025 - Technical Guidance Brief: Effective At-Scale Nutrition Social and Behavior Change Communication

“Successfully influencing human behavior requires an understanding of how behaviors change.”

This technical brief summarises key considerations and provides links to available resources and tools to design, implement, monitor, and evaluate nutrition social and behaviour change communication (SBCC) interventions. As defined in the brief, “Nutrition SBCC is a set of interventions that systematically combines elements of interpersonal communication, social change and community mobilization activities, mass media, and advocacy to support individuals, families, communities, institutions, and countries in adopting and maintaining high-impact nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive behaviors or practices. Effective nutrition SBCC leverages enablers of behaviors and reduces barriers to adopting and maintaining behaviors over time.”

Published by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the brief is intended for USAID Missions and implementing partners working to implement the Multi-Sectoral Nutrition Strategy for 2014–2025.  The guidance brief is based on “the understanding that human behavior is complex and profoundly influenced by social norms, access to resources, self-efficacy, structural constraints and opportunities, and habits. Systematically addressing the range of behaviors that have a direct or indirect impact on nutrition as well as the social and environmental factors that influence the adoption and maintenance of these behaviors is critical to the implementation of the Multi-Sectoral Nutrition Strategy for 2014–2025 (USAID, 2014).“  It makes a case for increased emphasis on effective, at-scale SBCC to achieve the objectives of the Multi-Sectoral Nutrition Strategy and to improve nutrition globally.

The guidance brief contains the following sections:

• Introduction
• Why Do Behaviors Matter for Nutrition? - Virtually all the immediate and underlying causes of malnutrition are behavioural – influenced by the behaviours of individuals and their household members. Nutrition is, however, also influenced by the behaviours of many other actors, such as healthcare providers, school teachers, farmers, and religious and community leaders.
• How Do Behaviors Change? - The brief highlights the Socio-Ecological Model for Change which views individual behaviours as being influenced directly and indirectly by their social and economic groups, their physical environment, the market environment, and the public and private services and policies that guide them.
• How Are Behaviors Identified? - To identify the most critical behaviours, programme designers need to review the available data, conduct formative research, and analyse the causes of malnutrition in the particular context and for particular populations.
• Key Considerations for Nutrition SBCC Design - These include considerations such as integration of SBCC into project design from the start, using multi disciplinary approaches, and an outline of the typical steps in the SBCC design process.
• Key Considerations for Nutrition SBCC Implementation, Monitoring, and Evaluation - For example, the various elements of implementation and monitoring and evaluation (M&E) of nutrition SBCC interventions should be embedded in the overall implementation, design, quality assurance, and M&E plans of a given project because they are integral to the success of the programme.
• Advancing the Strategic Agenda for At-scale Nutrition SBCC - The strategic agenda focuses on several interrelated categories of actions to advance the impact of future investments in nutrition SBCC. These include: promoting scale-focused nutrition SBCC; driving excellence in design and implementation; and building on the existing evidence base for SBCC's impact on nutrition.
• Summary
• Additional Resources - Readers are encouraged to use these resources to help realise the potential of at-scale SBCC for creating lasting changes in nutrition.