Passages Project - Transforming Social Norms for Sexual and Reproductive Health

Social norms - unspoken rules that govern behaviour - shape the sexual and reproductive journeys of young people. They are enforced by peers, families, and communities who influence the way young people behave and think about sex, marriage, and intimate partner violence. Passages focuses on shifting norms through interventions that work to: combat stigma and myths related to FP use, increase male engagement in FP, reduce GBV, and improve gender equity attitudes and behaviours.

Passages' efforts to create an evidence base for effective policy and to develop and test scalable approaches to inform practice entail: 1) replicating and scaling up social norm interventions and applying implementation science principles to explain what makes interventions effective and sustainable at scale in real-world contexts; 2) strengthening in-country capacity to plan, implement, monitor, and evaluate the scale-up of effective pilot initiatives to address normative change; and 3) distilling and sharing evidence and sparking dialogue on integration, measurement, and evaluation of normative interventions.

Specifically, Passages works with USAID missions and other partners to improve and build organisational capacity to support programming and research through the following activities:

• Provide technical assistance to health and other sector programmes interested in including norms-shifting approaches to promote RH and well-being. For example, assistance could be provided to programmes seeking to incorporate norms-shifting approaches to interventions working to empower women, prevent GBV, and delay marriage.
• Provide technical assistance to FP programmes to integrate approaches for fostering supportive social norms and to ensure they are designed and implemented with scale-up in mind.
• Raise awareness and strengthen the capacity of national and organisational stakeholders to understand and address at scale the social norms that affect FP uptake.
• Support assessments and systems-based planning to expand and scale up pilots and other evidence-based approaches to establish social norms that support FP use.
• Conduct "realist evaluations" of existing social norm interventions to inform expansion, using an evaluation approach designed to answer the questions: "What works, for whom, in what respects, to what extent, in what contexts, and how?"
• Design and conduct research to measure the effect of normative interventions and assess their expansion.
• Apply new approaches to measure gender norms, conduct research with early adolescents, and monitor and evaluate scale-up.

Rationale for the project: 
"Early pregnancy and child marriage are a reality for millions of young women worldwide, curtailing educational and vocational opportunities, leading to poor sexual and reproductive health and contributing to the intergenerational cycle of poverty. A focus on individual change is important but insufficient to meet this challenge. Young people's ability to forge healthy sexual relationships is influenced by social norms enforced by their peers, families and communities.

Social norms shape behaviors related to sexual debut, intimate partner and sexual violence and early marriage, as well as access to education and the services and information they need to protect their health. Research has shown that investing in social norm change at the community (rather than individual) level, while ensuring supportive policies and access to good quality services, can bring about significant improvements in sexual and reproductive health."