The ABCs of SBC

SBC in Emergency Settings

• Season 1 • Episode 2

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Sure, Social and Behaviour Change (SBC) can help people make healthier food choices and complete important civic processes like voting or registration. But what can SBC do in moments of duress? When conflict erupts? When a natural disaster strikes? When a new virus breaks loose? Does SBC have a role to play in a rapidly unfolding emergency? Can it serve and protect the communities most affected by these emergencies?

In this episode, Qali speaks to SBC practitioners who have responded to emergencies from Lebanon to Mozambique to understand whether SBC can truly serve vulnerable populations in humanitarian emergencies.

Guests (in order of appearance)

  • Luca Solimeo, Chief of Social and Behaviour Change at UNICEF Lebanon
  • Xaher Gul, Public Health Physician and Development Practitioner 
  • Mónica Wills-Silva, Director of International Programmes EMEA at the Behavioural Insights Team
  • Naureen Naqvi, Lead SBC Specialist in Humanitarian Action at UNICEF
  • Mariana Palavra, Social and Behaviour Change Specialist - Emergency Response Team (ERT) at UNICEF

Resources (in order of mention)

The views and opinions expressed by the contributors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of UNICEF or any entities they represent. The content here is for information purposes only.

The ABCs of SBC is hosted by Qali Id and produced and developed by Helena Ballester Bon in partnership with Common Thread.

Check out UNICEF’s latest publication on Social and Behaviour Change, Why don’t you just behave! For more information about UNICEF SBC, check out the programme guidance.

Have a question, comment or story idea, please contact sbc@unicef.org


(Compilation of news reports reporting on: War in Ukraine, Gaza, COVID-19, and other major emergency humanitarian events that happened in recent years). 

[00:00:33] Qali Id: Welcome to the ABCs of SBC, UNICEF's podcast on Social and Behaviour Change or SBC. And I don't know if it's just me, but the past few years has felt like we have more challenges and not enough solutions.

In this episode, we'll be exploring the role of SBC in emergency settings. Understanding how to best support marginalised communities who've been impacted by conflict and violence is on everyone's mind. And SBC practitioners are no exception. Here's Luca Solimeo, Chief of SBC with UNICEF Lebanon.

[00:01:13] Luca Solimeo: I think that SBC is going through very challenging times.

We need to continuously rethink about our role and mandate. And in a way, we need to keep also our focus on longer term behavioural change, which is also very challenging. This requires a solid investing on evidence generation, framework analysis, in capacity building, and also in piloting and trying new theoretical approaches.

For example, when we work on child marriage, on breastfeeding, on parenting skills, at the same time, we live in a world which is more and more insecure. We are exposed to conflicts, climate change, emergencies. More recently, new pandemics drain our resources at a quite short term, immediate humanitarian interventions. With the recent tragic events in Ukraine, Ethiopia, Sudan, Palestine, also here in Lebanon, donors are clearly more and more inclined to demand immediate results and are less generous in a way and less patient than a few years ago. 

In this context, how I think that behavioural science can still play a critical role and benefit the vulnerable population? That's something that I still question myself. How can we explain this to the communities, to partners, to donors, and also to our management? Without sounding theoretical, abstract, or too academic.

[00:02:34] Qali Id: That's a great question, Luca. What can social and behaviour change really do in a rapidly unfolding emergency? Can SBC really benefit those with the least resources? Those most frequently left behind? Children? And how does one begin to communicate what SBC can and can't do to people who work at and with UNICEF in ways that they can truly understand?

Like Luca, I'm also curious as to how social and behaviour change can really serve those who face insecure shelter, food, and education. Challenges that grow tenfold in the face of an emergency. 

In this episode, you'll get to hear from experts from across the world of social and behaviour change, as we explore if SBC can really make a difference for groups that are hard to reach and become even harder to reach in conflict and other emergency settings.

First, let's hear from Xaher Gul, a clinician based in Karachi, Pakistan, who specialises in integrating SBC and system strengthening, particularly in the private health sector. 

[00:03:37] Xaher Gul: I'd like to qualify that term first, "difficult to reach". I'd like to think of that term in two dimensions. One is where our programmes cannot reach them due to geographic or security or law and order situations, where our staff cannot go in. That's one interpretation of being “difficult to reach”.

The other dimension, when we say a certain community being “difficult to reach,” so a lot of the sexual and gender minorities may fall into that. They are hard to reach because these communities have been severely marginalised. They are hidden, and they are hidden because they are under threat. If we want to make a difference to reach these communities, we need to address the causes of that marginalisation, which means addressing the differential between power and paternalism in communities and creating programmes which bring these communities out of the darkness and shadows and into the centre.

So that involves movement building, the S part of SBC, social change, that relates to community organisation and community building activities. Now, this may seem challenging in conflict settings. However, we never start with the population en masse in any setting. We start with a few visible champions and influencers.

We start by community building with a few early champions and adopters. They come together. They start gaining momentum and building that platform. And focusing on things like collective efficacy and social capital and community capacity. 

[00:05:10] Qali Id: So one way to do that is through mobilising people. A few at first, but how do we get from just a few people to the broader social change that you've described?

[00:05:20] Xaher Gul: In those conflict settings, a core group of key influencers who represent the community would be your eyes, ears, and boots on ground. And the aim being that they create the inroads for their own community. And I think I would like to highlight that in conflict settings, communities are extremely proactive in many ways.

There's a flight and fight response that's at play. So every single time we have worked in a conflict setting, there have always been champions and volunteers who are ready to help and support. It's a question of reaching them and facilitating them to mobilise and make inroads into communities, giving them the resources to be their own voice, find their own solutions and do their own interventions. 

[00:06:03] Qali Id: For interventions and programmes to really work in a community, they need to be led and owned by the community itself. And Xaher wasn't the only person who stressed this. Here's Monica Wills-Silva, an advisor at Behavioral Insights Team, on why partnering with community is so important.

[00:06:21] Monica Wills-Silva: They know the norms much better than we do, so like a fundamental first step to me is identifying those key players on the ground that you can work with that have the legitimacy. And then mapping out both potential touch points as well as like structural barriers. I think in understanding the context when you're working in conflict and fragile states.

[00:06:40] Qali Id: What do you mean by mapping touch points and structural barriers? Can you give an example of this?

[00:06:45] Monica Wills-Silva: In northern Nigeria, one of the things that we did is we introduced an intervention into existing radio shows that were broadcasted to a very large proportion of the population in northern Nigeria. So we didn't have access to the vulnerable population, but we knew how to get to them through those radio shows.

And there might be other touch points like those ones that are existing to the vulnerable population that you want to reach in safe ways, so it's important to start by mapping them out. And then when I say identifying the structural barriers is because like behavioural science can only get you so far if the structural issues that might be happening in a conflict space or in a fragile state are, are too wide reaching, basically. So it's important to understand the sort of circumstances you're working in. 

[00:07:27] Qali Id: Thank you, Monica. 

I'd love to hear more about how practitioners get that full picture in actual emergency situations. We were lucky enough to get hold of Naureen Naqvi, who specialises in applying SBC to humanitarian responses.

Can you tell us a bit about what you do, Naureen? 

[00:07:46] Naureen Naqvi: Part of my job is to look at all the different types of emergencies across the globe, wherever UNICEF operates, and that includes natural disasters and conflict situations, migrants, refugee crises, and you know, there are so many other things happening.

Disease outbreaks are one of them, and of course, we just recently had a pandemic. I personally believe that our work is central to the emergency response because we talk about people and the people-centred approaches. The idea is that when we think about people as the recipients of humanitarian aid, we don't just think about the supplies, you know, we also talk to people.

What are their needs? What do they think about the services that they are getting? How we can serve them better? And then looking at the behaviour side, that's the technical area that we need on. 

[00:08:47] Qali Id: So what's the first thing you do as soon as you get to that emergency you're meant to be responding to? What do those first 24 hours look like?

[00:08:56] Naureen Naqvi: Actually, you know, it starts even before we get deployed. Before I leave, you know, I like to have as much information as possible. I request for any reports, any data that exists, any plans, response plans, etc., everything. When I go, there are some, let's say, procedures that, you know, I always follow. 

Like, um, number one, is there any rapid assessment that is there? One rapid assessment the interagency group does is about people's needs and all that. That doesn't necessarily have a lot of information that we need about people. So that kind of rapid assessment is something that I love to do always. That's what I help with, like, you know, talking to different kinds of people like men and women separately and also young boys, young girls. Frontline workers, volunteers, you know, things like that. Conducting a few focus groups. 

And then the feedback that I receive. I would look at, you know, what is it that our response plan is showing? Are we really responding to what people are feeling or trying to get from us? It's not always about the supplies or commodities, uh, let me tell you, but the information itself becomes critical in any emergency.

So is that information tailored, you know, for certain audiences, for example. I mean, if somebody speaks some local language and we are developing something in English, which I have seen in some places, by the way. That is a useless exercise, right? And that's why it's so important to get to know people. Who do they listen to? Do they listen to radio or do they like to listen to the mosque imam? You know, I mean, so it's so important for us. 

And then we develop, kind of, um, our plan, uh, implementation plan. And that is not just developing the office, by the way. Based on that evidence, we go and we talk to people. We try to create local, uh, volunteers in most of the cases because community, every community has their own networks and their own structure, their own way of living. And there are people that are influencers within that community. It can be a religious person, it can be a local leader, you know. It can be a youth leader or a mother. It could be anybody. 

So we look for those people, we try to build capacities, you know? Empower them by building their capacity. So they work for their own community, you know, so that's one thing that I always stress on, because when you go somewhere, you want to leave some capacity behind, to put some systems in place. Like information systems, data collection systems, community feedback systems. So there is continuous, let's say flow of information. 

And we don't work alone, by the way. On ground, we work with all different sectors, such as gender, and disability because, you know, sometimes in some disasters, we forget about people with disabilities and people who become disabled because of, let's say, this war in Gaza. I mean, we are so worried about huge numbers of children who are now, who have become disabled. 

So these are some of the, let's say, standard ways of working for me. But before we leave, we don't just leave just like that, "hey, finish, job finished," and we just leave. We always try to leave some kind of system behind, uh, tools and knowledge behind, so people continue doing what we start. And then we also continue our remote support for some time in order to make sure that, uh, we are not just totally disconnecting ourselves from the country office colleagues. 

[00:12:48] Qali Id: We also got to speak to Mariana Palavra, another UNICEF SBC specialist who is also part of the emergency response team and therefore frequently on the ground responding to humanitarian situations.

[00:13:00] Mariana Palavra: There's a little bit of a provocative or a kind of a triggering question that sometimes I do after providing some trainings. I ask colleagues like, “if you had to choose one or two of these kinds of strategic access, which one would you choose?” You know, we have been through all the different steps — the institutionalisation of SBC, the coordination, the data for action, the community engagement, the risk communication, the monitoring evaluation, et cetera, et cetera.

And there's no right answer, but I have my answer. For me, it's coordination and evidence in general, both social behaviour data and, and feedback. And even if I had to choose only one from these two, it will be coordination. The reason is because we are not alone. We are not alone. So if you have a good coordination, I might be an organisation, whether UNICEF or not, with no funds or with no human resources, but if we are coordinated, we might have that data that maybe my organisation could not collect it, but we might get it through another partner, right?

We will have the community engagement initiatives that can even be thought through in the coordination group, but maybe it's one or two organisations who have more resources or have access that will implement it, but will do it right and then we'll come back with the results and we'll come back with those communities so we can talk together.

So again, I keep stressing if I had to choose one and, unfortunately most of the time we don't need to choose, but if I had to choose, it would be coordination. 

[00:14:33] Qali Id: What are some examples of successful coordination in past emergencies you've responded to? 

[00:14:40] Mariana Palavra: So if you think about, um, a natural disaster like the one that happened in Mozambique in 2019, we as UNICEF, we had an SMS based platform, which sometimes we can use it just to collect information, we can use it for monitoring evaluation purposes.

Because there was this coordination, we could offer all partners, "look, we have this couple of questions that can be both a script for mobilisers when they knock on the door, uh, they can also be for monitoring evaluation purposes, so we can actually check, you know, how many people they talk to, what children, et cetera, et cetera, disaggregated data, and we can also collect qualitative data through rumours,” right? To have nine different partners in Mozambique using the same questionnaire, the same script, the same platform and having joint results on a weekly basis, which would inform us not only on monitoring evaluation purposes, but on rumours and also helping and supporting the mobilisers in the field to follow some kind of a script — without coordination, that would be impossible. Like I said, fortunately, we usually, we don't have to choose only one thing, but just also to show how important it's to think that we are not alone, and alone actually we have zero value. 

[00:16:02] Qali Id: To bring it back to the second part of Luca's question, how do we explain the value of SBC without sounding theoretical and abstract? 

[00:16:13] Mariana Palavra: I guess the easiest way to do it is providing very concrete, but evidence-based examples.

And I say evidence-based examples because it's just not Mariana's or Naureen's opinion. Evidence is some of the things that social and behaviour change also leads on, at least on most of the country offices, right? Just to give examples, in the Ebola outbreak, there was some violence against, you know, humanitarian workers coming to the communities, all looking like astronauts, right? And dressed in white. And they also realised that a lot of the violence or the refusal was related to lack of respect. Because for instance, during the funerals, family members could not honour the body by washing it, but also could not even see the face because all the coffins were sealed and closed. 

And later on, data showing us, or, or at least the dialogue with community showing what was one of the things that they hated the most on our attitude and that obliged military actors to adapt the coffins, right? And at least putting some kind of, um, a transparent cover so that family members could at least see their loved one. 

And this is examples that are very well documented, are simple, that we should immediately, as our name card, you know? If doubts, if there are still doubts after 60 years of talking about the importance of engaging people, right? And unfortunately, there's still a lot of thoughts.

[00:17:43] Naureen Naqvi: I have seen the transition happening in the last few years. Of course, every agency, especially in UN, you know, every agency has their own main focus, area, mandate, and all. And UNICEF's mandate is women and children, and we are the ones who lead in community engagement and social behaviour change, basically. 

And we are trying to go into and join different coordination mechanisms, inter-agency coordination mechanisms, that are not just working during emergencies, you know, beyond emergencies. Well, like, you know, preparedness and policies and guidances and all that. And we are trying to bring in community engagement component or people-centred approaches or accountability to affected populations, anything that you would like to call it, you know? There are so many good jargons here, but just make sure that we weave it in every system. So it doesn't really look like, "oh, this is Mariana's baby," you know, or "this is what Naureen does," no — this is what everyone has to do. 

Because I believe that working with people is the, the core of everything that we do in emergencies and beyond emergencies. So if we are not thinking about people and we are thinking that we will provide enough vaccines, but people are not going to get those vaccines, then where is the gap? That's the gap that we fill, you know? So we are actually the vehicle that takes them from A to Z, you know? 

So we are like the "how" part of it, and the "how" part is, most of the time, the most difficult one. Because we don't always just come out and say, "hey, we vaccinated 2 million children here, we immunised 2 million children." But from not immunising and to immunising those 2 million children, what happened is our job.

We have to be consistent. We have to be there at the table. And we have to be there right from the beginning, you know, not really like an afterthought — "hey, we have $50,000 dollars, can you produce posters and flyers," you know? Instead of really having people with you and talking to them and having a meaningful conversation with people, so they feel that they are part of the process, not just at the receiving end.

[00:20:16] Qali Id: That's our show. This episode has delved into the various aspects of how SBC can make a tangible difference, even in the most challenging circumstances. From mobilising communities to addressing structural barriers, the emphasis has been on engaging people as active participants, rather than passive recipients of aid.

Through coordination, evidence-based approaches, and a deep understanding of local contexts, SBC specialists work to ensure that interventions are effective, sustainable, and truly serve the needs of the most vulnerable populations. As the conversation continues, it's clear that integrating SBC into emergency responses is not just a strategy, but a fundamental principle of humanitarian action, ensuring that no one is left behind.

If you're interested in any of what we've shared in this episode, there will be links and details on each expert guest in our show notes. If you want to do a bit more reading on SBC and emergencies, UNICEF has this great online resource which has over 43 tools to help experts and non-experts understand, practise, advocate for, and explain SBC.

Visit sbcguidance.org and go to the "Do" section. Filter by SBC in Emergencies and there you'll find tools like M&E in Emergencies and CHAT, the Community Engagement in Humanitarian Action Toolkit, a how-to for community engagement in complex emergencies. And if you have questions about SBC that you'd like us to answer, you can shoot us an email at sbc@unicef.org, and we might be able to answer it in a future episode. Stay tuned for our next episode on the role of SBC in the climate crisis and the fight to save our planet.