Grow Together: SBCC Campaign Integrates Multiple Sectors

Summary:

Integrated programs are increasingly called up to address multiple issues by linking and integrating program design, delivery, and evaluation across sectors. For social and behavior change efforts, such programs bring big opportunities and big challenges. Without creating confusion or diluting emphasis, SBCC must create a whole that is more than the sum of the sectoral pieces. This means contending with multiple social and behavioral outcomes, often with the same families and communities. The Grow Together campaign in rural Cambodia is a multi-faceted SBCC campaign to support and sustain greater demand for and appropriate utilization of key services, practices and products focusing on social norms and 13 evidence-based behaviors integrated across health/nutrition, agriculture and water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH). Endline survey data show that the campaign effectively met this challenge with a coherent framework that unified multiple complex social and behavioral outcomes across health/nutrition, WASH and agriculture. Implemented in waves, the systematic process allowed core social change concepts to be established first before promoting behaviors through the locally meaningful creative and interactive media and materials.

Background/Objectives

The multi-sectoral nutrition project utilizes SBCC as a cross-cutting approach to underpin all social and behavior change efforts by creating and sustaining greater demand for and appropriate utilization of key services, practices and products. To hold together and add value to these efforts, the Grow Together campaign reaches audiences from provincial leaders to rural caregivers of young children. The key to the approach of the Campaign is to integrate and embed the Grow Together media and materials into all activities and ensure that the activities enable the critical behaviors

Description Of Intervention And/or Methods/Design

The strategy includes a multi-dimensional monitoring, evaluation and learning plan to track and measure outputs and contributions to project outcomes. To assess the intended effects, the project conducted a baseline in 2015 and an endline in 2018 to compare exposure, participation and core indicators. The endline survey sampled 2,257 primary caregivers of children under 5 years across the three project provinces and analyzed the data in SPSS 23.0 and WHOs Anthro software, for anthropometric data.

Results/Lessons Learned

Comparison between baseline and endline showed significant positive trends in most of the 13 key behaviors including health service utilization, maternal dietary practices, young child feeding practices, household agriculture and hygiene and sanitation practices. There was no change in exclusive or continued breastfeeding; these behaviors were already high (over 85%) and there was no significant decline observed like elsewhere in the country. Exposure to the Grow Together campaign and participation in community activities was high: over 80% of caregivers had seen four or more SBCC media or materials; and on average, caregivers joined five types of community activities. The overall findings suggest that SBCC can effectively integrate programming across sectors engaging multiple participant groups and coordinated channels. The relative cost of the SBCC campaign was low, about 3-5% of the overall budget. The approach could be replicated in future programming.

Discussion/Implications For The Field

The Grow Together campaign experience offers an effective model for SBCC to unite multi-sectoral nutrition programs and achieve optimal practices within households and communities across health, agriculture and water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH). The campaign creates a whole greater than the sum of the sectors, and coherently unify multiple, complex social and behavioral outcomes across sectors. Implemented in waves, the systematic process first set a strong foundation by fostering underlying social norms to create an enabling environment for good nutrition, and then promoted key behaviors.

Abstract submitted by: 

Lisa Sherburne -  The Manoff Group

Math Srales - Save the Children

Carolyn D'Alessio  O'Donnell - Save the Children

Kristen LaFleche - The Manoff Group