<h4>Gender at the Centre Initiative (GCI) Policy Paper</h4>
UN Girls' Education Initiative (UNGEI)
"In the context of gender-transformative education, the school environment can be a space for learners, teachers, school leaders, parents and communities to challenge gender inequalities and promote positive norms and practices..."
<div class="field button"><a href="https://www.ungei.org/sites/default/files/2022-04/GCI_Policy_Paper_V3.pdf" target="_blank">Click here for the 62-page report in PDF format.</a></div>
UNGEI website, April 27 2022. Image credit: GPE/Kelley Lynch (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Aga Khan University Hospital (Siddiqui, Padhani, Salam, Aliani, Das, Bhutta); The University of Adelaide (Lassi); The Hospital for Sick Children - SickKids (Bhutta)
"Improving coverage requires an integrated approach that ranges from individual-level interventions to vaccine mandates at the national level."
Vaccination coverage plateaued in the decade of 2010-2020, with 20 million children globally unprotected and 10 countries accounting for 62% of unvaccinated children in 2020. The purpose of this systematic review was to evaluate the effectiveness of potential interventions to improve the uptake of vaccines among children and adolescents aged 5 to 19 years.
<div class="field button"><a href="https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/149/Supplement%206/e2021053852D/186948/Interventions-to-Improve-Immunization-Coverage" target="_blank">Click here to read the article online or to download it in PDF format (18 pages).</a></div>
Pediatrics (2022) 149 (Supplement 6): e2021053852D. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2021-053852D. Image credit: Tapas Kumar Halder via Wikipedia (CC4.0)
"Interventions and programs that are creative, multi-faceted, and innovative will be required in order to address the factors contributing to the prevalence and impact of CEFM."
This set of seven technical briefs focuses on the use of social and behaviour change (SBC) approaches to strengthen the collective effort to reduce child, early, and forced marriage (CEFM). Breakthrough ACTION developed the briefs for an intended audience of programme designers and implementers by drawing lessons learned from interventions conducted all over the world.
The briefs focus on:
<div class="field button"><a href="https://breakthroughactionandresearch.org/using-sbc-to-enhance-programs-to-end-cefm/" target="_blank">Click here to download all the briefs as a ZIP folder or to access them individually.</a></div>
English; French
News and updates from the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs, April 27 2022. Image credit: Jonathan Torgovnik/Getty Images/Images of Empowerment (CC BY-NC 4.0)
As one aspect of the Breakthrough ACTION initiative, funded by USAID, there is a focus on social norms, social change and social determinants; '"Most effective SBC [social and behaviour change] frameworks and process models...aim to include and review many social determinants....Despite these and other efforts to call attention to the deep structural barriers that impede health, the field of SBC is often drawn back to focus on the individual and must do more to address these determinants where possible."
For your review, discussion and comment three recent publications on this theme from Breakthrough ACTION include:
Halmstad University
"The described method enables increased influence for children with disabilities in research and design processes. This might in the long run also influence norms of decision-making within such contexts."
The concept of health care as co-produced, as opposed to simply delivered, aims to increase the quality and efficiency of care, including in paediatric contexts. Participatory design and research with children requires tools that enable and empower children, but challenges arise when involving children with disabilities, where a low level of participation is the norm. A norm-critical mindset allows for a rethinking of power distributions and conceptions of disabilities as barriers. Grounded in a norm-critical approach, this paper describes a participatory persona generation process that aimed to engage children with disabilities, in the direction of increased representation, norm-creativity, and inclusiveness.
<div class="field button"><a href="https://jopm.jmir.org/2022/1/e29743" target="_blank">Click here to read the article online or to download it in PDF format (18 pages).</a></div>
Journal of Participatory Medicine 2022;14(1):e29743. doi: 10.2196/29743; and email from Britta Teleman to The Communication Initiative on April 28 2022.
"UNICEF integrates community engagement, behaviour and social change into humanitarian preparedness and response..."
The Core Commitments for Children in Humanitarian Action (CCCs) are the United Nation's Children's Fund (UNICEF)'s core humanitarian policy and framework for humanitarian action. The CCCs set organisational, programmatic, and operational commitments and benchmarks against which UNICEF holds itself accountable to deliver principled, timely, quality, and child-centred humanitarian response and advocacy.
<div class="field button"><a href="https://www.unicef.org/emergencies/core-commitments-children" target="_blank">Click here in order to download the CCCs in PDF format.</a></div>
English, Arabic, French, Spanish
140 (English); 136 (Arabic); 148 (French); 144 (Spanish)
UNICEF website, April 19 2022. Image caption/credit: Young boys display their immunization cards during the documentation of measles, rubella and polio vaccination in Aguket Village, Busia District, Uganda (2019) © UNICEF/UNI240296/Abdul
The strategic process for identifying and shifting social norms is hugely complex and challenging - and massively important for effective development action. Social norms affect all aspects of the local, national, and international development process - policy development, policy engagement, accountability, resource allocation, representation, inclusion of multiple voices, strategic analysis, scale and nature of participation, behaviours, gossip (!), media priorities, perceived status and roles, and so much more.
To: The Communication Initiative Network
Evidence Demonstrating Impact - RCTs and Systematic Review Data - Issues - Strategies
Best wishes and much strength for your very important work.
The CI has recently been working in partnership with and with support from UNICEF New York to identify high quality, high credibility, recently peer review journal published research data (with a numeric impact point) that provides compelling evidence for the positive direct impact of social change, behaviour change and community engagement action on priority development issues. A consultation group from this network provided review and input.