The ABCs of SBC

SBC in Behavioural Insight Units in Government

• UNICEF SBC • Season 2 • Episode 8

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For decades, governments have tackled public health challenges with clear policies and well-funded campaigns, only to find that the outcomes don't always follow. Information alone rarely changes what people do. Across the world, behavioural insights units have quietly taken root inside governments, helping policymakers understand why people behave as they do, and what it actually takes to shift decisions in everyday life.

In this episode, Qali follows the setup of a new Behavioural Insights Hub in Sri Lanka, a partnership between the Ministry of Health and UNICEF. From the first week-long workshop with senior health officials, to early interest from the President's office, to the disruption of Cyclone Ditwah just as the work was getting underway, this discussion explores what it takes to build behavioural science capacity inside government, and why the slower work of testing, learning, and embedding new ways of thinking is where real change happens.

You'll hear from:

  • Dr Ranjith Batuwanthudawe, Director of the Health Promotion Bureau, Ministry of Health, Sri Lanka
  • Ukasha Ramli, Global Behavioural Science Lead at UNICEF
  • Ravinda Panchal Abeysinghe Wanninayake Mudiyanselage, Social and Behaviour Change Officer at UNICEF Sri Lanka
  • Dr. Senal Fernando, Medical Officer - Health Promotion Bureau, Sri Lanka
  • Dr. Ganga Tennakoon, Registrar - Health Promotion Bureau, Sri Lanka
  • Dr. Amanthi Bandusena, Consultant Community Physician - Health Promotion Bureau, Sri Lanka

Resources:

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 UNICEF in partnership with Common Thread.

Check out UNICEF’s latest publication on Social and Behaviour Change, Hidden in Plain Sight, a celebration of the everyday heroes on the frontlines of public health outbreaks, or the first publication, Why don’t you just behave! For more information about UNICEF SBC, check out the programme guidance.

We care about what you think — you can share your thoughts on the podcast using this feedback form. For all other inquiries, please contact sbc@unicef.org.

Ranjit:

We have a problem related to nutrition. There had been lot of work being done, a lot of money spent, but the nutritional related indices, they were not improving as expected. There's this argument. Are we giving the correct, advices? We are giving the correct advices, but people are not practicing it. We have not been systematically analyzing their existing behaviors we realize that we badly need to dive into behavior insights.

Qali:

Across the world, governments are dealing with problems that don't have easy solutions. The policies are often in place. The guidance is clear, and yet the outcomes don't always follow. Improving nutrition, reducing disease, encouraging safer behaviors, these are challenges that can't always be solved by information and policy alone. So what's missing? In Sri Lanka, the Ministry of Health together with UNICEF, is exploring that question through behavioral science, looking more closely at how people actually make decisions in their everyday lives. As part of that, they've begun setting up a behavioral Insights hub inside government. Over the past decade or so, behavioral insights units, sometimes called nudge units have quietly spread across governments from London to Warsaw, to Mexico to Lagos, and now Colombo. In this episode, we'll follow the setup process in Sri Lanka. From the first workshop to the early momentum, to the realities of trying to make something like this work inside government. So what is a behavioral science unit? Here's Akasha, Romley, UNICEF's, global Behavioral Science Lead

Kash:

Within the context of government, a behavioral science unit, , applies behavioral science. So taking insights and methodologies from across the social sciences to understand people's behaviors to help support the design of interventions or policy to try and encourage positive behaviors for society.

Qali:

What kind of positive behaviors do they focus on?

Kash:

I mean, it depends on which ministry or which department of the government it is. Right. So with a lot of health related behaviors. You know, those are generally quite positive behaviors. And so, eliminating, , smoking behavior, , increasing positive parenting. Increasing nutritious consumption. So behavioral science units within governments kind of came in and demonstrated their ability to achieve, , the goals of the government, but in a very cost efficient way. So. This was how like nudges became popular, right? So you could implement these small interventions that were cheap to implement, but had huge effects. And one of the earliest examples of this was around the behavioral insights teams that came out of the UK cabinet office that developed ways to increase tax collection through cheap, , campaigns. And so that obviously from a government's perspective, being able to increase revenue with very little costs was highly attractive. And so this led led to its popularity and then saw its growth across other sectors, , across the government so suddenly. It was the recognition that behavioral science could help them solve the final mile problem in a lot of public policy issues where the technical solutions were there, the infrastructure were there, but it was just trying to convince people to change their behaviors to align themselves with their objectives of public policy.

Qali:

How did UNICEF get involved in setting up these behavioral insights units? What's the connection to UNICEF's work?

Kash:

So UNICEF's main partners are governments, and our job is to support governments to deliver for their populations. And so as behavioral science grew within unicef, it was only natural that we then sought to try and create behavioral science units within governments to also help them apply behavioral science themselves to achieve the goals that we both share. so it's just an extension of the capacity building that we do at the moment. We might help train frontline workers or we might create job descriptions for Ministry of Health to hire the right people to deliver, to deliver services. And so behavioral science is a natural part of that, right? So if we believe that behavioral science is an effective way to change behaviors, then we should empower government with that capability, to do so themselves. Historically and at the moment with several countries, we provide that technical assistance on behavioral science, but the goal is always the same across all of unicef, which is that eventually we want to empower governments to be able to do these things themselves.

Qali:

Building capacity is one thing. Setting up a new team that lasts inside government is another. So how do governments actually set up these units in practice?

Kash:

So to set up a behavioral science unit, you can have many, many different structures. You can either have a single internal consultancy unit that then serves many different government departments or ministries, or you can just have one embedded within a specific ministry , or you can blend from lots of different ministries or, or departments and things like that, right? So there's lots and lots of different, , structures in which this can happen.. And then again, going back to having , a champion in this case, we had a champion within Ministry of Health who saw the value. It was in the Health Promotion Bureau. So their work is about trying to change behaviors.

Qali:

Dr. Ranjeet bat, the director of the Health Promotion Bureau explains the model sri Lanka chose.

Ranjit:

So, the model we have selected is to initially work from the Health Promotion Bureau for the Ministry of Health with the scope of upscaling to other sectors. The good news is already we have two, , calls for support, , by two different communities to understand their behavior insights. So one of my colleagues has started working with the ministry of, , fisheries to understand , some of the behaviors in the fishing community, and I am working with, , tertiary level education set up that's a vocational training and the university, students to understand, their behaviors related to their mental health related decision making.

Qali:

So the idea is to start within the health Promotion Bureau and then expand outwards. And that's already beginning to happen with interest coming in from other sectors like fisheries and education. But even with that early interest, something like this only works if people inside the system are willing to back it.

Kash:

I think the initial challenge is about the setting up of the unit, right? The structure of it, getting buy-in from somebody senior enough within the government that can make it happen, that can ensure its sustainability., Usually these things come about from having a certain champion within the government who sees the value in behavioral science and wants to push it forward. If it's somebody who's a little bit more junior, then the big challenge is then finding somebody senior enough who can really , push this through. Because at the end of the day, we need government to also invest into this. We need government to be buying into it. We need them to be lending people to actually help do this. So having that initial champion is always really important. And I think until you get significant buy-in from either someone very senior or from multiple different departments or ministries, then it's, it's hard for it to fully take off and for it to achieve any meaningful results.

Qali:

In Sri Lanka, some of that buy-in is already starting to take shape.

Ranjit:

We have already,, made initial contacts with the highest possible office in the country that is a president's office. We had an initial discussion about how behavioral insights would help the good governance, and we are in the exchange of ideas and way forward. So I believe, continuous and,, positive growth beyond the health sector, , this behavioral insights to be used., But of course it's be too early to predict anything big, but we are hopeful.

Panchal:

In our case, the Ministry of Health. Played that role and Ministry of Health really embraced, , the suggestion to go ahead with the behavioral insights, and we saw how much of results that it brought to us. So my suggestion is to identify,, correct partners, , develop the process collaboratively, and then aim for the higher results.

Qali:

The President's office. Now for a unit that didn't exist a year ago, still finding its feet inside a single ministry, that's a significant reach and a sign of how far Dr. Rejet is thinking. But it didn't start there. It started in a meeting room in Colombo with a group of senior health officials stepping away from their usual work to try something a bit different. For a week, they worked through real problems, not just listening, but analyzing behaviors, breaking down decisions, and testing ideas together. Here's cash,

Kash:

First we go in for a one week's worth of training just to go through the different phases of a behavioral science, , program, different methodologies, different techniques of implementation. And then we, all work through an example together in separate groups and things like that.. Typically, so the background of who attends. And in this instance, because we had somebody more senior in the Ministry of Health, to better position themselves as well. They invited. Senior people , from various other departments within Ministry of Health. And what was interesting there was because, I mean, these are, highly qualified medical professionals as well. And so it was quite interesting and somewhat fun because. Some of the technical components , they were already very well aware of. Right, . So, evaluation is always the, the most tricky component when you're doing these trainings.'cause causal inference is not something that naturally comes to everybody. And statistics is not a fun subject for a lot of people. Whereas , for these doctors,, they already knew a lot of it. And so it was great because you could jump straight into the deeper discussions. So that was fun., even when we were working through the process of behavioral science, it was great to see how they then brought in their knowledge and experience, into the process themselves.

Qali:

For a whole week, they took the kinds of problems they deal with every day and looked at them differently, breaking down behaviors and thinking about what might actually shift them. We spoke to some of the participants to hear more about what they learned in the process.

Dr Sal Fernando:

I'm Dr. Sal Fernando. I'm a medical officer from Health Promotion Bureau in Sri Lanka. This is a new approach for Sri Lanka behavioral change itself because, , we were doing lot of, , education, knowledge improvement., Programs, but we didn't see much improvement because , , it's not easy to improve behaviors. Even we improve the knowledge. It is not easy to change a behavior. So this will be very useful for us to think in a new way and change our strategies.

Dr. Gang:

I'm, , Dr. Gang. I'm a registrar in Community Medicine, working in health promotion bureau. right now we are , doing so many interventions., More focused on some behavioral changes and over the, , last 10, 20 years of behavior change, communication, social and behavior change, communication. So many campaigns and interventions has been implemented, but we are not quite sure. Some are not that very successful, so , , before implementation, I feel they better do some behavioral perspectives, behavior analysis, and studies. And then we can go focused approach and focused interventions to get better outcome.

Community Physician:

I'm Dr. Amanti Band consultant, community physician, heading the Risk Communication and Policy Advocacy unit of the Health Promotion Bureau. I think we do need to really understand in depth the reason why people do behave the way they do. Because there may be so many factors, which we do not think of because we may be technically having the knowledge, but we don't know culturally and personal motivators and demotivators as to why people do these things. So it's very important to have in-depth insight into behaviors. I think one key takeaway is to make the behavior that we are promoting fun, fun, attractive, easy to do, and readily accessible.

Qali:

There's a real sense of possibility there. People thinking differently, and there's an appetite to try new approaches, but that kind of momentum doesn't always last once the workshop ends. So how do you keep it going?

Kash:

That's always the biggest thing, right? So like everyone, you know, energy is a high, once you've just completed the training, people are highly motivated. Everyone thinks this is great, but then. Something happens, right? Like a, a project takes too long to get approved by the right people. Funding doesn't come in quick enough. Um, a natural disaster or some sort of public health outbreak happens and everyone is now massively distracted.

Qali:

Because in Sri Lanka, something did happen. Just as the workshop ended, cyclone Dua hit the country bringing heavy flooding and landslides and displacing hundreds of thousands of people. Over 1.8 million people were affected, including more than 460,000 children. At that point, everything shifted. The focus moved to emergency response and the work on the Behavioral Insights hub had to pause. We spoke to cash a few months later to see where things stood and what a behavioral insights approach might look like in a situation like this.

Kash:

It's definitely taken a pause. But hopefully as things start to calm down, then we will be able to go back and be able to identify the projects and start to build on it. We identified the projects at the end of the last workshop, but now it's just about moving on to actually implementing it. In any other situation. We'd hope to be able to see how behavioral science can contribute to emergency response., And I think this is something that, that we don't see a huge amount on., Not to say that there isn't any,, but we often apply behavioral science in situations where I don't, I wouldn't say things are calmer, , but behaviors are a little bit more stable., I think there's always this belief that in an emergency situation, behavioral science doesn't necessarily have a place.. But I don't know, I think an emergency state has become the normal state for lots of countries and lots of places., So we do need to reconsider how, , behavioral science can be applied in an EE setting. The pressures in emergency situation is where people's decision making are most likely to take a hit , because of the stress, because of the time limitation., But that's where we really need to ensure that decision making is optimized., And so behavioral science can probably help to create structures around that.

Qali:

Even before the first project had begun, reality provided a speed bump. Progress doesn't always follow a neat plan. It depends on time, on resources, and sometimes on events that are completely outside anyone's control. The workshop was just the starting point. What comes next is slower- building the expertise, testing the ideas, ensuring that this way of working can actually make a difference. For Dr. Ranjit, the next phase is where it really matters.

Ranjit:

Continuous, , technical support is a absolute must because, uh, we have a little bit of expertise here, but that expertise need to grow and we need the experiences to be shared and to learn because this is a brand new concept we are rolling out. It'll take some time for people to, see and feel and appreciate the change. So initial phase, I'm looking at two to three years would be crucial for the Sri Lankan bi hub and the BI work to be nurtured.

Qali:

According to Kash, The starting point might already be there.

Kash:

I think I would push back against a lot of the governments that come out and say, we don't have this capacity. We don't know how to do behavioral science because in my experience. It's more like they definitely are, like governments are often filled with really smart, capable people who haven't labeled themselves as behavioral scientists, but definitely have the set of skills and the capability to do behavioral science. And they've been doing behavioral science, right? It's just, they're just not labeled it that. But it's more about coordinating that effort. It's about creating a system for that, for those efforts to be implemented. And that's all we're doing is just to gather the people about, and part of the process of setting up behavioral science units is usually what we do is we do a mapping of their capacities. And what we find often is that. There's an entire behavioral science team, it's just dispersed across the government. And so it's just finding those different skill sets, and then maybe there's a couple of gaps here and there on very specific technical skills where we support them to recruit for those additional skills. But they're all behavioral scientists. They've just not come up through the official training plan or whatever. But yeah, they're very much capable.

Qali:

So let's say that the team is in place, people are working together. Maybe they've had some initial training. What happens next?

Kash:

The real value comes from when we then identify what is it that we want to work on, right? We identify one potential project that achieves the goal of that government unit or of that government department. And also is something that's attractive enough to then sell behavioral science to the rest of the government. So the best way to be a behavioral science unit is just to do behavioral science. And I mean this is applicable not just to government, but to, to any behavioral scientists or aspiring be scientists. Is that the everything that you learn from textbooks or from courses are great, but they're basic foundations, which you'll never fully enact until you just do it. There's so much nuance in behavioral science beyond the science itself about how to do it successfully, right? It's sometimes it's the really boring admin stuff or it's the operational aspects of it, which you don't really necessarily learn until you go out and just actually implement and do it. And so that's why a big component of our capacity building strategy is identifying a project and just working closely with them so that they experience the entire process. They go through every single step and usually after one or two projects, they're flying on their own. They do it much better.

Qali:

In Sri Lanka, the Behavioral Insights Hub is still in its early days. Its success will depend on sustained support, evidence, and on whether it can show that thinking differently leads to better outcomes. If the Behavioral Insights Hub works, it won't just change a few campaigns. It could change how policies are designed in the first place, and that's the long game. Special thanks to Dr. Ranjit, bat Dawe director at the Health Promotion Bureau of the Ministry of Health, Pancha Ainge Social and Behavior Change Officer at unicef. And Asha Romley, behavioral Science Global Lead at unicef. I'm Galia Reid, and you're listening to the ABCs of SBC.