Beyond the Knowledge Gap: Reframing What Evidence Tells Us

Our research across twelve Nigerian states on child marriage, gender-based violence, women's economic empowerment, sexual and reproductive health, and HPV vaccination identified a consistent pattern: silence is systematically taught, rewarded, monitored, and enforced.
During adolescent social network mapping, girls asserted that those they fear, rely on, or must obey are often the same individuals they cannot approach. In community dialogues, mothers described silence as "protection," fathers called it "respect," teachers labelled questioning as "stubbornness," and religious leaders promoted it as "faith" and "obedience."
Silence serves as a social norm closely tied to gender, reputation, and social belonging. Girls do not report abuse, challenge forced marriage, seek sexual and reproductive health information, negotiate financial autonomy, or request HPV vaccination. This is not due to a lack of awareness, but rather because speaking up carries social risk, personal blame, and moral sanctions.
This presentation examines how silence is produced, taught, enforced, and internalised, and explores how conditions can be redesigned to enable girls to speak. To support different choices and actions, we must first ensure it is safe for girls to speak.

Flipping the Financial Script: Learning from the Markets We Overlook

In emerging markets, like South Africa, financial literacy isn't missing; it's misdiagnosed. Youth, women, gig workers, and non-salaried individuals routinely make smarter, more adaptive money choices than their middle-class counterparts. They budget by hand, save in stokvels, borrow through trust, and track every cent. Yet, they're called "unbanked", "undereducated and "uninsurered". The real issue isn't a lack of literacy - it's a lack of recognition.
This talk challenges SBCC to flip the script on who holds knowledge. It invites the global community to look beyond formal products and institutional frameworks, and to start listening to the lived systems of financial resilience that already exist. If we truly aim to reimagine equity, action, and knowledge, we must treat financial inclusion not as a gap to be filled but as wisdom waiting to be acknowledged.
This is a story of strength misread as weakness. A case for seeing the excluded as experts. And a call for SBCC to stop designing for people and start designing with them.

What makes us choose the foods we eat? Is it only nutrients and health guidelines, or also the stories, memories, and emotions attached to them? In West and Central Africa, where nearly 73 million children under five face food poverty-meaning they do not consume at least five food groups a day-these questions are urgent.
For years, traditional counselling on child nutrition has raised awareness, but knowledge alone rarely shifts behaviours shaped by poverty, convenience, cultural norms, and the persuasive power of commercial marketing. Families know the "right" advice, yet guidance often feels disconnected from daily realities.
This is why MAGENTA, together with UNICEF WCARO, turned to social marketing-not to inform, but to inspire demand for nutritious foods. Our research went beyond the classic focus on knowledge, attitudes, and practices. Using an innovative mixed-methods design grounded in social psychology, we explored not only barriers and enablers, but also product, packaging, and pricing preferences-the very elements that shape purchasing behaviours.
Caregivers became active co-creators: tasting new nutritious products, testing packaging and messages, and sharing honest reactions that guided the design of a responsive marketing mix. This participatory process revealed not just nutritional insights, but also the household and community dynamics that shape feeding decisions.
The outcome? A regional social marketing strategy, translated into tailored country plans, ready to guide programmers and governments to improve nutrition outcomes. The lesson is clear: change comes not from telling people what's healthy, but from making healthy foods desirable, accessible, and truly wanted.

Samira, a 26-year-old mother in Lebanon, and Mahmoud, a 40-year-old farmer in Jordan, share a common struggle: raising children amid stress, inherited beliefs, and societal pressure for harsh discipline. The Social and Behavior Change (SBC) Minimum Standards transform their daily realities by offering clear, actionable steps to replace punishment with care. Rather than warning against violence, the standards empower parents to understand what drives their actions, co-design solutions, deliver context-appropriate interventions, and evaluate change. Through viewing clubs, community sermons, and peer groups, parents like Samira and Mahmoud learn to pause, redirect, and praise, discovering that trust, not fear, builds respect.
Violent discipline affects more than 80 million children across the MENA region. The SBC Minimum Standards provide a unifying framework that turns scattered programs into a coordinated movement for positive parenting. In Egypt, over 1.5 million caregivers have participated in activities, and 15 million have accessed online content; in Syria, a youth-led process to develop a national VAC brand has mobilized stakeholders around non-violent norms. By standardizing how programs understand, co-design, deliver, and evaluate interventions, the approach builds shared accountability and sustainability across contexts.
For practitioners, the standards ensure consistency and scalability; for policymakers, they enable cross-border alignment and monitoring; for communities, they make change visible and credible. Ultimately, for children, they mean safety instead of fear. This 10-minute story illustrates how the SBC Minimum Standards "flip the switch" from violence to nurturing care, turning ordinary moments into extraordinary regional change.