Play, practice and participation: how interactive approaches are driving change

Between October 2024 and August 2025, World Vision and Wahana Visi Indonesia piloted a Social and Behaviour Change (SBC) intervention in six villages of East Lombok District, West Nusa Tenggara Province, Indonesia. It is an area with high stunting prevalence (37.6% in 2022), poverty, and child marriage. Baseline findings showed that 72.6% of children ≥6 months met Minimum Dietary Diversity, but only 20% avoided ultra-processed foods. Most caregivers (88.6%) expressed interest in learning about child feeding and care, but preferred hands-on methods such as cooking demonstrations (82.2%). Photovoice research reinforced these insights, revealing that rural mothers desired fun, engaging activities and playful approaches to learning. 
Based on these findings, a three-session "crash course" parenting class was designed for caregivers of children under five, emphasizing direct demonstration and interactive games. Parenting classes are usually limited to urban, higher-income families, making this rural pilot particularly innovative. A total of 722 caregivers participated, with 522 completing pre- and post-tests. 
The crash course used cooking demonstrations, blind food testing, stimulation activities, and various games. Results showed significant knowledge gains across all caregiver groups, with improvements in Minimum Dietary Diversity (MDD) in three of four groups. Beliefs shifted toward greater family support for child feeding, and attitudes on feeding difficulty improved, although results varied by site and age group. 
This pilot highlights the promise of community-based crash courses in rural areas. Scaling up will require refining content, addressing operational challenges, and integrating peer support to sustain learning and participation. 

India's foster care system remains nascent, with 559 children placed nationally as of 2025. Existing SBCC resources on foster parenting largely reflect Western models, which inadequately address Indian socio-cultural realities. This initiative applied Behavioural Insights (BI) and Human-Centred Design (HCD) approaches to develop a foster parenting package tailored to Indian families.
Guided by foster parents' lived experiences and multi-stakeholder workshops, we mapped the foster parenting journey in five phases: awareness, application, initial adjustment period, stabilization, and closure, to capture foster families' evolving needs. This article presents a diagnostic review of 60 SBCC resources using the COM-B model (Capability, Opportunity, Motivation - Behaviour) to assess how well the resources build parental knowledge and skills, reduce social barriers, and enhance motivation for responsive parenting behaviours. 
Findings revealed that parents' needs were unevenly supported across phases of the journey. Early-phase resources leaned heavily on information delivery, often technical, or designed for system officials rather than prospective parents. In contrast, the emotionally demanding phases, 'initial adjustment' and 'foster term closure', had the least parent-facing resources, relying almost entirely on counselling. Where resources did exist, they tended to overload parents with generic advice, lacking "how-to" skills, scenario modelling, or scaffolding for difficult parenting moments. The most effective resources combined user-friendly, reflective language, emotion-based appeals, with modelling of target behaviours. 
Applying a behavioural lens distinguishes materials that merely inform from those that enable behaviour change. These findings inform the design of a parenting package to support Indian foster parents.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a critical One Health challenge, now causing more deaths annually than malaria and HIV combined. Yet, community-led social and behaviour change (SBC) interventions to tackle AMR remain under-evaluated. The MRC-funded COSTAR (Community-Led Solutions to Antimicrobial Resistance) project tested whether the Community Dialogue Approach (CDA), a repeatable, participatory communication process, could shift antibiotic knowledge across human, animal, and environmental domains in rural Bangladesh.
A two-arm cluster-randomised trial was implemented in 50 community clinic catchments in Cumilla district, comparing communities that received 11 structured dialogues led by trained local facilitators (n=221; 50% women) against controls. Dialogues, supported by co-developed flipbooks and storytelling, encouraged reflection, shared decision-making, and collective action.
A total of 4362 dialogues were facilitated, 2289 with women, and 2073 with men. Across 80,164 attendees, 42,983 were women and 37181 were men, some participants may have attended multiple sessions, so figures reflect attendances rather than unique individuals. 
Results showed statistically significant improvements in community knowledge of antibiotic use for human health (+16 percentage points (pp), p<0.001) and animal/environmental health (+12 pp, 95% CI: 5–19, p<0.001). Effects were strongest among frequent participants. Process evaluation findings demonstrated high facilitator ownership, community trust, gender-inclusive participation, and strong linkage with health structures. 
These results provide the first experimental evidence that a locally owned CDA can effectively translate complex AMR concepts into community knowledge and some self-reported action. Overall, the CDA's integration within Bangladesh's community clinic network helped institutionalise One Health engagement.

Background: Adolescents in Nepal continue to experience early marriage, early pregnancy, and unsafe sexual practices, largely due to limited awareness and inadequate access to information. Schools serve as a critical platform for addressing these issues, and reproductive health (RH) has been integrated into the national curriculum. However, stigma and limited teacher capacity hinder effective delivery. To strengthen classroom practices, a pedagogical training manual on RH was developed and piloted in 12 districts. Review meetings with teachers and school principals were conducted to assess the effectiveness of the pedagogical approaches across all districts. However, following changes in United States funding policy, financial constraints limited the continuation of the intervention to only one district. This abstract aims to demonstrate the effectiveness of pedagogical approaches in enhancing classroom delivery of RH education and fostering positive social and behavioral change among adolescents.  
Finding: Teachers reported greater confidence in delivering RH messages when using the pedagogy compared to traditional methods. Interactive activities such as games, role-play, competitions, problem-solving, and songs created an engaging classroom environment, enabling students to discuss RH issues more openly and seek solutions. These approaches not only encouraged student participation but also reduced teachers' hesitation in addressing sensitive topics. It identified as an effective strategy to enhance adolescent knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors regarding RH while building teacher confidence.
Conclusion: Early results show that this approach is an effective way to RH behavior of adolescents and should be scaled up at national level, with integration into the curricula of teacher's training.