Design With, Not For: Practical Tools to Center Community Participation in Creative SBCC Design

A water well that everyone wanted, yet no one uses. A clinic the community asked for, but won't enter. Community leaders make declarations against FGM, and the practice occurs in secret. Well-intentioned interventions can sometimes fall short of expectations-resulting in unintentional harm, unforeseen risks and resistance, or unused resources. There are three interrelated reasons this may occur:

1. Surface-level understanding: Desk review, primary research, and field research do not adequately uncover why a challenge is occurring, and instead remain focused on what is happening, leading to output focused interventions that provide numbers needed for reporting but do not deliver on social behavior change outcomes. 

2. Design Constraints: Practitioners are overwhelmed with data and struggle to derive actionable insights, or are constrained by resources and expectations in ways that prevent the design of truly responsive interventions.

3. Lack of contextualization: Interventions sometimes fail because they were not relevant to the community's context or adequately tested with them before implementation. 

For over a decade, Firsthand has supported teams around the globe in generating creative solutions through sprints, builds, and prototyping, providing a low-cost and rapid way to generate, test, and design programme interventions. 

This session will equip social and behaviour change practitioners with practical tools to: translate insights into ideas that directly address behavioural barriers, generate creative, contextually relevant interventions that go beyond "business as usual", and rapidly test, iterate, and refine solutions to ensure sustainability and scale.