Case Studies

Global

The Global Judicial Integrity Network

The Network, which aims to strengthen judicial integrity and prevent corruption, uses methods aimed at connecting judges, exposing existing and emerging challenges, and fostering a sense of belonging to be part of a global movement.

The key example of the Network providing behavioural support is its practical package of the Judicial Ethics Training Tools, which sensitises judges to the wide spectrum of situations that may arise and aims to improve the behaviour of judges in the future, including through education on cognitive biases.

To date, judges in over 60 jurisdictions have committed to using the initiative’s Judicial Ethics Training tools, with more than 6,800 members of judiciaries involved.

Jordan

Increasing female labour market participation using BeSci

Female labour market participation is low in Jordan and has recently dropped to 13 percent. The project systematically measured social norms and cultural beliefs to better identify barriers to increased participation. eMBeD is supporting the Government of Jordan to incorporate the findings and recommendations in upcoming communication campaigns promoting women’s economic empowerment.

Peru, South Africa, Indonesia

A Growth Mindset to increase Test Scores

Like many other countries, Peru is worried about standardized test outcomes and what they mean for students, especially for the increasing gap between students from high- and low-income households. The standard approach to improving student achievement involves investing more in teacher training and learning materials. Researchers from the World Bank, the University of Oxford, and the Group for Analysis for Development (GRADE) in Peru decided to take a different approach. They developed a project called “Expand Your Mind” which is focused in developing motivation and perseverance.

Through this growth mindset intervention, students and teachers in 800 selected public schools and high schools were asked to read an essay titled “Did You Know You Can Grow Your Intelligence?” and to do a series of activities to demonstrate that they understood the content of that essay. Messages that promote the idea that intelligence is a skill that can be improved through practice and effort significantly increased student achievement in Peru.

The intervention led to a 0.14 standard deviation increase in math test scores, equivalent to four months of schooling, at a cost of less than $0.20 per student. eMBeD reached 50,000 students in an initial phase, and an additional 250,000 subsequently.

Replicated interventions in  South Africa and Indonesia have had similarly promising results.

Global

Nudging for a more Gender-Aware Work Force

The Nudging toolkit supports colleagues in integrating and leveraging BeSci to address gender inequality challenges identified in employment policies. The toolkit provides practical cases and is used in workshops in which the Centre explores BeSci in employment-related contexts. It has also helped to make the theoretical frameworks of nudging more accessible to colleagues.

Global

Wild For Life

The Wild for Life Campaign aims to motivate citizens worldwide to support an end to the illegal wildlife trade.

Leveraging BeSci principles such as social proof, normative feedback and precommitment, the campaign seeks to encourage individual pledges to advocate against the illegal wildlife trade and to make consumption choices that do not threaten species (e.g. not buying products made from protected wildlife, supporting companies that demonstrate sustainable supply chains).

The campaign is supported by an influencer-driven, social-first strategy, seeking to leverage UNEP’s online strengths and network of celebrity champions, who have helped Wild for Life reach over a billion people and engage at least ten million as measured through likes, shares and follows.

Brazil, India, Mexico, Nigeria

Using entertainment-education to improve literacy

In 2016, the World Bank’s Development Impact and Evaluation (DIME) launched this programme to explore the use of entertainment media designed to change perceptions of social norms, achieve adoption, and sustain healthier behaviours at scale. The DIME programme is launching a series of experimental evaluations of games, apps and digital books aimed at improving self-efficacy and literacy outcomes among vulnerable populations in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East.

Poland, Latvia, Indonesia

Increasing tax compliance using BeSci

BeSci has long informed tax policy by employing social norms cues to increase payment compliance (e.g. for example, by telling people that others have paid, leading to them to increase tax compliance by way of such comparison). The World Bank partnered with the tax authorities of Poland, Latvia, Kosovo and Indonesia to test how behaviourally-driven solutions can improve tax declaration and payment rates, enhance a tax authority’s processes, and ultimately increase government revenues. Similar efforts were carried out in Guatemala and Costa Rica.

Global

Reframing Health Recommendations for Mothers

The WHO reframed antenatal care and childbirth recommendations in a positive way (rather than clinically and with technical language) to increase acceptance and uptake of recommended maternal care and childbirth interventions. It is based on women’s perceptions, attitudes, and values, and designed to address challenges such as anxiety and fears, a lack of clarity on information provided by health professionals, social norms around childbirth, and the perceptions of over-medicalisation.

Republic of Moldova

Positive Deviance to Combat Violence against Women

UN Women and partners have since 2015 jointly identified successful behavioural strategies that help prevent, overcome and tackle violence against women – the so-called positive champions (positive deviants) among women survivors of violence, police officers, social workers, and even former aggressors. In this way, UN Women managed to change the perceptions about the survivors, so they are acknowledged and involved as the key experts in eliminating violence against women at the legislative, policy, institutional and community level initiatives.

Global

Climate Neutral Now

The initiative aims to enable individuals, civil society and organisations to estimate their climate footprint, encourages them to reduce it and offset non-avoided emissions using certified carbon credits.

It identifies current emission behaviours and prompts change by offering alternative behaviours and promoting structured goal-setting. Inviting people to take a pledge fosters the setting of implementation intentions, which is found to be successful in helping individuals to actually carry out a behaviour. People are invited to take a pledge and agree to measure emission sources, identify reduction strategies, set goals on how to implement them, and share their progress publicly.

Belarus

LEARN.ACT.SHARE

Leveraging a network of activists, the LEARN.ACT.SHARE. camp in Belarus engages young people in the prevention of human trafficking presenting information in a way to promote clarity, awareness and action.

As of January 2021, the camp alumni had reached out to 4,380 peers with their campaigns and received positive feedback, which demonstrates young people’s behavioural change stemming from their participation in the project. Alumni of the programme also contribute to community discussions and debates about human trafficking which serves as a testimony to the project’s sustainability.

Global

Learnscapes

The Centre supports colleagues in designing training programmes in a behaviourally-informed manner by creating a structure which helps learners pursue their desired paths.

The approach has been piloted in two Train-the-Trainer fora and is now offered as a tailor-made event for organisations or institutions. One event has led to the publication of Learnscapes (2015), which explores how the Training Centre can apply BeSci to encourage more meaningful interactions. The project works closely together with architects and explores how physical and digital spaces can nudge towards specific knowledge sharing behaviours.

This project will inform the creation of a Learning Innovation Lab, which will focus on nudges for learning and behavioural change.

Global

Be He@lthy, Be Mobile

The use of mobile and wireless technologies has the potential to transform the face of health service delivery across the globe. There are reportedly more than 7 billion mobile telephone subscriptions across the world, over 70% of which are in low- or middle- income countries. In many places, people are more likely to have access to a mobile telephone than to clean water. As a global society, we are also facing a looming threat of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs), which kill 41 million people each year, around 71% of all deaths.

To address this challenge, the Be He@lthy, Be Mobile (BHBM) initiative was set up by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Telecommunication union (ITU) in 2012. BHBM works with governments to scale up mHealth services for NCDs and their risk factors. Millions of people have already been reached through the programmes and evaluation shows that they are impacting positively on users’ health.

The approach is deliberately designed to be scalable: instead of promoting specific products, it provides cross-cutting health content and technical support which can be used and incorporated into other applications. It also works to develop the broader ecosystem within which a national mHealth programme will sit, helping ensure that it is integrated with other health services. In doing so, each programme becomes a sustainable part of the health system whilst also helping to promote health and wellbeing around the world.

The initiative’s immediate objective is to continue expanding the number of countries it works with and the variety of diseases it addresses. Longer-term, its objective is to help the global community achieve Goal 3 of the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030: “To ensure healthy lives and promote wellbeing for all at all ages”. With requests for support from over 90 other countries around the world, the initiative looks forward to seeing mobile phones deliver improvement on a global scale.

Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Burundi, Mali, Niger, Senegal

Dimitra Clubs - Community Engagement for Empowerment

Dimitra Clubs are voluntary, informal groups for women, men and youth who discuss common problems and determine ways to address them by acting together and using local resources. Agriculture is a common theme, but it’s not the only one; other topics include climate change, education, health, infrastructure, nutrition, peace and women’s status. Although FAO facilitates their set up and provides them with training and coaching, the clubs themselves are self-managed.

Indonesia

Using BeSci to increase the use of bank accounts in Indonesia

Pulse Lab Jakarta ran a behavioural experiment in the form of an 8-week WhatsApp campaign aimed at disseminating a set of key messages to bank agents. The messages (i.e. graphics, comics, written text) were sent to shop owners (who were also bank agents), urging them to encourage their customers to save the change from purchases made at their shops in their bank accounts. The messages shared as part of the #TabunginAja (“#JustSaveIt”) campaign, were informed by BeSci and included setting specific goals and applying rules of thumb to prompt the target behaviour (e.g. to encourage agents to ask their customers to save their shopping change if the amount is less than USD0.35).

Côte D'Ivoire, Gambia, Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone

Migrants as Messengers in West Africa

This peer-to-peer campaign empowers young people in West Africa to make informed migration-related decisions. The campaign is led by returning migrant volunteers who share honest accounts of their migration experiences with their communities and families through a variety of online, on-air and on-the-ground channels. Scientifically rigorous impact evaluations are used to assess the impact of the campaign. They consist of randomised controlled trials in which engagement activity effects are assessed in an experimental approach. The evaluations measure shifts in knowledge about the risks associated with irregular migration, intentions, attitudes and perceptions towards irregular migration. In addition to four impact evaluations that will be conducted in 2021-2022, a pilot study conducted by phone/WhatsApp is currently attempting to measure the effect of the interventions on actual migration behaviour.

Côte D'Ivoire, Guinea, Gambia, Nigeria

WAKA Well

IOM X seeks to move beyond raising awareness to affecting behaviour change. It does so by applying Communication for Development (C4D) and BeSci principles such as social influence and implementation prompts to encourage young people to make informed migration decisions. The IOM X model has been applied internationally, including most recently in West Africa where it is called WAKA Well. The model facilitates a process where a tailored multi-media campaign targeting a specified community is led by its youth and other community members, who direct audiences to informational material available in their communities. In order to approximately assess the impact of the campaigns on behaviour change, surveys measuring the knowledge, attitudes and practices among the target audience were conducted before and after the campaign.

Costa Rica, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador

Somos Colmena Campaign

"Somos Colmena" is a C4D campaign which leverages behavioural science working with communities to develop campaigns that help fellow community members make more informed decisions about their life plans, recognise fake information, and identify opportunities for local development and regular migration. The virtual community “Somos Colmena” is part of a strategy that informs and facilitates behaviour change.

For example, in a campaign conducted in 2020 in Costa Rica, “Somos Colmena” referred irregular migrants to an Information Hub that assisted them in their regularisation process.

Global

Clean Seas Campaign

This campaign aims to reduce single-use plastics and phase out avoidable plastics, such as microbeads, within a five-year period. It works with governments to support urgent action, with the private sector to transform their business practices, and with citizens to call for action on this issue. The campaign seeks to galvanise action on marine litter and associated issues through demonstrating social proof of momentum for change through public commitments and demonstrations of action from individuals, government and the private sector. Individuals are encouraged to publicly commit to changing their plastic use behaviour in an effort to shift social norms.