Research to Practice: How Social Norms in Fragile Settings Shape Social and Behavior Change Platforms

This panel demonstrates how rigorous social norms research can be directly translated into impactful, culturally appropriate Social and Behavior Change (SBC) platforms in fragile settings. Research on social norms and SBC can significantly impact public health outcomes. In Sub-Saharan Africa, especially in fragile settings, research on social norms is key to behavior change, addressing issues like violence and child marriage. Social norms are the implicit, often unspoken rules that shape behaviors and practices within specific groups. Understanding social norms and their key drivers is essential for designing socially and culturally appropriate SBC programs in South Sudan. These insights help identify which behaviors to target and how to do so effectively. Influencing social norms, in addition to individual attitudes and behaviors, can achieve behavior change on a large scale and thus support systemic social change. To understand social norms in specific regions in South Sudan, a social norms assessment was undertaken to provide overall and SBC-specific recommendations. To address key recommendations from the social norms assessment, a co-design process included key stakeholders working together to co-design and pre-test existing global SBC tools or develop new SBC tools. This included a culturally acceptable value proposition, and the assessment helped to validate and further contextualize the findings from a literature review. The complexity of translation of research to practice, followed by the development of subsequent interventions and activities is discussed and the panel offers lessons learned. Innovative adaptations in fragile settings are discussed.