Global community of professionals working in Communication for Development
Designed for practitioners, trainers, and students of behavior change or social marketing, this case study shows how to take the guesswork out of two critical decisions:
Use the case study kit to teach or learn about methods for behavior change and view A&T’s final TV spot on handwashing + child feeding.
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Improving handwashing with soap practices can save children’s lives by reducing preventable diseases like diarrhea and acute respiratory infections. Despite its effectiveness in reducing disease, handwashing with soap is uncommon in many countries. The Water and Sanitation Program (WSP) conducted research with local partners in Peru, Senegal, Tanzania, and Vietnam to understand the factors that affect an individual’s decision to practice handwashing with soap. The research informed the implementation of handwashing project activities in the four countries. Following national and local government implementation, WSP and its partners gathered valuable lessons, which inform this handwashing with soap toolkit. The toolkit, intended for practitioners interested in behavior change, is organized into four modules, each with reports and presentations about the lessons learned from the projects, as well as mass media, direct consumer contact, and interpersonal communication tools used throughout the project.
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The Government of Nepal aims to achieve full water and sanitation coverage by 2017. The bilateral Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Project in Western Nepal (RWSSP-WN) works with local governments in 14 districts, aiming to declare them open defecation free. This behaviour change communications evaluation explored how to improve RWSSP-WN’s present practices to reach the diverse target population in the Terai districts, where more than 1 million people still defecate in the open.
The study reviewed RWSSP-WN’s present behaviour change triggering tools and related communications strategies. The findings suggest that availability of subsidies seems to change how people think about sanitation and tends to eliminate willingness to pay for a latrine. The authors recommended strong advocacy for a no-subsidy policy, and more attention paid to alternative financing options with targeted support to the poorest of the poor.
The present behaviour change triggering tools do work as intended, but there is a need to develop pre-triggering and post-triggering strategies to increase the overall impact. The pre-triggering strategy would ensure that potential barriers to change are identified and addressed before the actual triggering event, and that the key stakeholders are prepared for the actual triggering event. The post-triggering strategy is needed to continue motivating households to change via messages that tap into the drivers of change, addressing also the barriers which may keep each household from changing behaviour. This paper provides a number of recommendations applicable for those working with local governments and communities to increase the scope and scale of behaviour change triggering.
Households living in densely populated urban slums often lack the space for their own toilet, making shared sanitation the only viable solution. This is the situation in Dhaka, where many of the city’s low-income residents depend on one of the city’s enormous number of shared compound toilets: a recent study by the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research Bangladesh (icddr,b) estimated that 4.3 million people in Dhaka use such facilities. While shared compound toilets can play a central role in urban sanitation provision, it is notoriously difficult to keep these facilities clean and well-maintained, leading to an unhygienic and unpleasant user experience and often to under-use or eventual abandonment.
As part of its 2012 – 2015 DFID-funded research programme, WSUP commissioned a research project in Dhaka to explore behaviour change strategies to help users keep their toilets clean and functional. The study aimed to design, pilot and rollout low-cost behaviour change messaging approaches and associated simple hardware provision. The research team used a randomised control trial (RCT) design to evaluate the impact of the intervention on toilet cleanliness and other metrics. The results indicate that this type of behaviour change approach can be strongly beneficial to shared toilet cleanliness and functionality.
This Discussion Paper presents the context, methodology, results and conclusions of the study. The paper is derived from the final report of researchers from icddr,b, Stanford University and Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health.
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Open defecation (OD) remains a critical global health challenge, afecting almost 1 billion people around the world and contributing signifcantly to the estimated 842,000 people who die each year because of poor sanitation, hygiene practices, and unsafe water supplies (WHO, 2014).
To date, most behavior change frameworks for addressing OD have focused on relatively conscious, “reflective” drivers of behavior, including people’s emotions (e.g., pride, shame), rational knowledge (e.g., of germ theory), social norms, and explicit action plans (e.g., commitments to change; see Sigler, 2014).
Using the framework popularized by Kahneman (2011), these factors can be described as “System 2” drivers of behavior (i.e., relatively conscious and motivational factors). It is now well established, however, that human behavior can also be heavily influenced by “System 1” drivers (i.e. relatively automatic, cue-driven drivers; Marteau et al., 2012; Wood & Neal, 2015). System 1 factors of particular relevance to OD include people’s hygiene habits (e.g., mindlessly repeated behaviors cued by context) and “nudges” (i.e., small changes to the environment that can channel decision making and behavior in new ways, Thaler & Sunstein, 2008). This working paper draws on basic scientific findings from psychology, cognitive science, and behavioral economics to propose a framework of 8 System 1 Principles to support the initiation and maintenance of OD behavior change.
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