Story as Strategy: Reshaping Narratives Across Health and Society

Data is often seen as the ultimate persuader. We measure awareness, attitudes, and adoption. Yet, despite the abundance of information, true transformation remains elusive. This presentation challenges the overreliance on facts and statistics, arguing that while data informs, only stories transform.
Drawing on experiences from global campaigns, from crisis response during the Ebola outbreak to gender and youth initiatives with the Mastercard Foundation, Mimi Kalinda reveals how the human brain connects not to logic, but to emotion. She illustrates how integrating storytelling into evidence-based communication strategies can bridge the gap between what people know and what they do.
This talk invites practitioners to rethink the architecture of influence. It offers a framework that combines behavioral science with narrative empathy, turning data points into lived experiences, and audiences into protagonists of change.
At a time when misinformation thrives and attention is fragmented, the future of SBCC belongs to those who can make people feel before they act. Because in the end, the story is not what follows the data, it's what gives the data its meaning.

For decades, SBCC across Africa has too often echoed voices and frameworks developed elsewhere. Campaigns are translated, not transformed and as a result, they inform but rarely inspire. This presentation challenges the dominant narrative that behavior change is primarily a technical exercise of message design, rather than a deeply cultural act of storytelling.
Drawing on over two decades of experience leading communications across the continent, from crisis campaigns with the African Union and global philanthropies working across the continent, to youth and gender initiatives with the Mastercard Foundation and the Obama Foundation, Mimi Kalinda explores what happens when communities reclaim the right to tell their own stories. Through powerful case examples, she illustrates how traditional oral storytelling structures, metaphors, and local idioms have been successfully integrated into SBCC strategies to shift norms around health, gender, and identity.
This talk argues that behavior change cannot be imposed; it must be evoked from within. To achieve real transformation, we must move from communicating to communities to co-creating with them. By centering African voices and indigenous narrative forms, SBCC practitioners can build approaches that are not only more equitable, but more effective because they resonate emotionally, culturally, and collectively.
Ultimately, this is a call to reimagine Africa's place in the global communications ecosystem: not as a recipient of narratives, but as an originator of them.