High quality social and behavior change for good nutrition requires collaborative efforts across multiple sectors. To ensure that young children consume safe, affordable, and diverse food, social and behavior change (SBC) practitioners must identify and promote key behaviors within sectors such as: food systems and markets, food security, gender, water, sanitation and hygiene, and health. Prioritizing high-impact behaviors across sectors is a key step in designing high quality, effective SBC. This process maximizes programs' time and resources, to focus on the highest impact behaviors which can lead to improved health and nutrition outcomes, and avoid oversaturating program participant groups with messages. 


This session will share a donor's perspective on prioritizing behaviors in multi-sectoral programs and an implementing partner's perspective on how this works in practice. Following internal mid-term evaluations of USAID country activities, we developed a practical tool to prioritize behaviors. Programs in Kenya, DRC, and Mozambique user-tested and refined the tool. For donors, lessons include the need to support programs to prioritize behaviors through improved processes at the proposal and award stages as well as in SBC strategy design and implementation. For program implementers, learning is about how to reflect national priorities in the prioritization process, and how to facilitate decisions within program teams and with stakeholders.

COVID-19 has grappled the world including India which was hit by deadly waves of infections leading to loss of lives, impacting families and communities across the country. This has brought to focus the importance of healthy hygiene behaviors, particularly, Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) practices and the need to empower communities to achieve healthy and sustainable change at the local level. Through this project, the emphasis is to build a model for cross-sectoral partnerships for sustained healthy hygiene behaviors through Social and Behavior Change Communication (SBCC). The interventions aim at capacitating community structures to map the availability of WASH resources in their communities through participatory methods and addressing the gaps by mobilizing entitlements and generating demand through SBCC. The project is being implemented across 101 villages catering to tribal and marginalized populations in Chhattisgarh, India with poor WASH infrastructure and health services. These SBCC strategies adopted will enhance the knowledge, attitude and practices of community through various community structures. This will enable an ecosystem around healthy hygiene behavior and will strengthen the availability of WASH infrastructures at the household and community levels.

The WHO (2019) stated that harnessing the power of digital technologies is essential for achieving development and health goals. Use of digital interventions extends beyond ownership of, and access to mobile, media, and other technology devices. Audience segmentation, a benchmark for social marketing programs, improves understanding of differences within an audience and informs interventions to increase acceptance and use of digital technologies. Unilever's UJoin project was an internet-based platform for Duka (informal retail shop) owners that aimed to enhance livelihoods through wealth-building services that strengthened entrepreneurial capacity, business management skills and relationships with customers, and promoted health roles for Duka owners. 807 Duka owners in three districts of Nairobi, Kenya, who were registered with UJoin completed a survey in October 2019 to assess their perceptions, motivations, and use of digital interventions, and their beliefs about Duka owners as health educators. Latent class analysis identified three groups among UJoin users with unique characteristics and needs that influenced different patterns of engagement with UJoin. The Endorsers used UJoin frequently, valued learning and collaboration, and accepted a health educator role. The Unengaged were similar to Endorsers but had community, social and internet support needs. Skeptics used UJoin the least, did not perceive that UJoin positively impacted their business and skills, and did not value discussion, collaboration, or a health educator role. The results showed that large audiences have different needs and may need different strategies to facilitate easy engagement with technology and use of digitally-based program interventions for behavior change.

Malnutrition remains a challenge in Malawi and is a major contributor to preventable child deaths in the country. Sight and Life - a Humanitarian Think Tank - looked at the humble egg, to help solve this challenge. Eggs, which are an excellent source of protein and micronutrients, continue to be scarce and costly in Malawi – the average per capita annual consumption is only 27 eggs, compared to 180 globally. Cultural beliefs and taboos also discourage egg consumption. For example, in some Malawian communities, eating eggs is associated with stomach pains, or even with baldness in babies. 
To first address supply bottlenecks in the poultry landscape, Sight and Life along with Lenziemill (Malawi's largest animal feed provider and veterinary supporter), implemented the Egg-hub. The Egg-hub is a scalable and financially viable business model which organizes backyard farmers into small groups of five and supports them in setting up a medium scale poultry farm (720 – 1200 bird size farm), complete with cages and bio-security clothing. 
3.5 million more eggs are now produced annually in Malawi. With egg supply in place, Sight and Life then looked at increasing demand for eggs and subsequent egg consumption among pregnant and breastfeeding women, and children aged between 6 months to 5 years. To do this, a social marketing plan was developed with the overarching aim of contributing to reduced rates of malnutrition in Malawi. This employed the use of behaviour change across three levels - mass media, interpersonal and point-of-sale interventions.