Advocacy for Social and Behavior Change

Social and behavior change (SBC) is an essential component in achieving global development goals, yet it is often misunderstood, underutilized and underfunded. A targeted effort is needed to build awareness about the critical role of SBC in health and development progress.

Breakthrough ACTION is working to develop advocacy resources to help promote greater investment in SBC by governments, donors and decision-makers—at the global, regional, and country levels. We hope to join forces with a network of SBC champions who can come together to advocate for prioritizing SBC as an integral component of health and development strategies. Join us!

RESOURCES

Behavior Change Impact Website

An online collection of databases that support evidence-based SBC in family planning, HIV, and malaria. The databases extract intervention details, research methodologies, and results from hundreds of peer-reviewed articles to support program designers to understand what SBC approaches have worked and considers how programs might be adapted to their context. These databases, as well as accompanying reports, briefs, factsheets, and infographics provide program planners, implementers, and policymakers with the evidence they need to make the case for the value of SBC and to strengthen the impact of their SBC efforts.

Costing and Economic Evaluation

Breakthrough RESEARCH is gathering, analyzing, and sharing evidence on the costs and impact of SBC interventions to make the case that investing in SBC is crucial for improving health and advancing development. This provides an evidence-based rationale for donors, policymakers, and program managers to invest in SBC and makes guidance available to program implementers in other health and development sectors to analyze the costs, cost-effectiveness, and cost-benefit of their own programs.

Advocating for Social and Behavior Change in Family Planning Programs: A Message Framework (also available in French)

This message framework is intended to be used by SBC practitioners to advocate with influential organizations, coordinating bodies, and individuals to increase support for SBC in family planning and reproductive health (FP/RH). The framework provides guidance on messages to use with stakeholders who may be unaware or skeptical of the benefits of SBC in the FP/RH arena or have limitations in their ability to include SBC in their portfolio. This resource provides concrete talking points including evidence of SBC impact on FP/RH outcomes to make the case for investment in SBC.

Social and Behavior Change for Family Planning: Global Influence Strategy

The Global Influence Strategy provides a roadmap for increasing the amount and quality of SBC investments, and better including SBC approaches across other types of investments. This roadmap identifies three key pathways to improving awareness of SBC and its potential application across different types of FP programming; increasing investment in SBC approaches from FP donors and countries; and bolstering coordination between major SBC stakeholders to create a united front for its expansion.

Social and Behavior Change for Family Planning: Influence Strategy for the Ouagadougou Partnership Countries (French)

The Influence Strategy for Ouagadougou Partnership (OP) Countries provides a roadmap for increasing the amount and quality of SBC investments in family planning in the OP region.

Circle of Care Model

The Circle of Care is a holistic model that shows how SBC can be applied across the service continuum—before, during, and after services—to improve health outcomes.

Vasectomy Message Framework: A Tool to Help Advocates Prepare for Conversations with Key Stakeholders

This framework can be used to prepare for advocacy conversations with coordinating bodies, donors, and low- and middle-income country decision-makers to increase support for vasectomy programming to improve method choice.

Underfunded and Underutilized: An Argument for Vasectomy Advocacy to Improve Method Choice

This resource can be used to increase advocacy for the inclusion of vasectomy in family planning and reproductive health (FP/RH) investments, programming, and national strategies.

Advocacy Animations and Briefs

Short animations and accompanying briefs in English and French with compelling examples showing that investment in SBC is critical to meeting global- and country-level family planning goals.