TIP ONE:
Define what Meaningful Youth Engagement looks like for your Program
TIP TWO:
Plan Short and Long-term Engagement Opportunities
TIP THREE:
Include Chances for Skills and Leadership Development
TIP FOUR:
Engage Parents, Families, and Communities
TIP FIVE:
Invest Sufficient Resources and Time
TIP SIX:
Measure Results and Youth Engagement
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The Passages Project conducted a literature review of published grey and peer-reviewed literature to explore parameters of normative change interventions going to scale that were focused on adolescent and youth sexual and reproductive health. Forty-two (42) of 303 identified projects were eventually included in the review because they were going to scale and indicated an important focus on influencing community norms to achieve individual behavioral outcomes. Most projects were community based (35 of 42, or 83%) and employed social mobilization/community mobilization approaches, were designed to reach girls as well as boys, and were scaled up after evaluation of a pilot phase (39 of 42). Over half the reviewed projects (23 of 42, or 54%) employed evaluation designs that included comparison groups. Most assessed changes in knowledge (37), attitudes (39), and behaviors (41); relatively few assessed individual agency (14) and even fewer (12) assessed changes in perceptions of community norms, that is, perceptions of others’ behaviors and social expectations for their own behavior. Of these 12, only four (4) were explicit about what norms were being measured.
Most documentation was related to pilot efforts – only 13 focused on scale-up and seven of the 13 discussed institutionalization efforts (versus expansion). Almost three-quarters (30 of 42) of reviewed projects were scaled up by the same organization engaged in the pilot effort. Even though by definition the projects were in scale-up phase or operating at scale – the documents reviewed did not describe well the process of scaling up, how pilots were adjusted for new scale-up environments, indicators used to track scale-up activities, or methods to ensure intervention fidelity at scale. Still, the review highlighted several factors that projects cited as important during scale-up or during both pilot and scale-up phases.
Effective strategies revolved around community-centered SBCC approaches and their potential for starting and sustaining normative shifts. Authors noted the importance of public discussion to create the critical mass needed to achieve sustained social change and the importance of community-driven collective action to diffuse new ideas within the community. Interventions were designed to be relevant and interesting, thereby engaging communities in the SBCC effort. They linked community actions to policies and programs to legitimize community-driven efforts.
Attention must be paid to scale up implementation supports. In particular, interventions need to strategically engage influential community and government stakeholders, and to develop tools and guidelines for new users of the interventions.
Staff must have mindsets and skill sets reflective of normative change. Periodic reflection is critical to create personal clarity on how norms affect staff as well as communities they serve, and to encourage agility and capacity to manage scale-up processes in changing environments without compromising intervention fidelity.
Measurement of normative change and sustained impact is a challenge. The need to measure normative change and the absence of such measures in reviewed documents indicate it is not well understood and/or not prioritized as an outcome. Measuring the extent that normative change is sustained post-intervention is critical but not being done.
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For those in the world of international human rights and development programming seeking to eliminate harmful social norms and practices at a global level, the steps to scale up seem relatively clear. Step one: Develop an innovative new approach to solve a pressing social problem. Step two: Prove the effectiveness of the approach through rigorous evaluation techniques. Step three: Having established the approach’s “evidence-based” credentials, share it widely!
Innovate, evaluate, scale up.
Of course, this is a heavily curtailed presentation of this process, which includes many additional steps, stresses, and potentially decades of demands on program teams. But its essence is undeniably compelling all the same, even common sense. New innovations are needed to solve unsolved problems. These innovations can only be proven to be effective if they are subjected to high scrutiny. And if they do work, then perhaps there is even an ethical or moral obligation to share them widely. In the case of a new vaccine for a widespread infection, for instance, this central script is tried and true. Previously devastating diseases have become historical footnotes thanks to some variety of “innovate, evaluate, scale up.” But not all innovations are as easily replicable as vaccines, of course, and practitioners and scholars in the human rights and development world are starting to uncover particular challenges in trying to follow this script for their innovations.
This brief exploratory study aims to inform the nascent conversation about the challenges of applying the “innovate, evaluate, scale up” script in one compelling field of recent innovation: community mobilization approaches to address socially and politically sensitive issues, particularly but not exclusively intimate partner violence. Intimate partner violence, for instance, is different in important ways from many other development and human rights challenges. This form of violence rest upon unequal power among the genders, and the central importance of power to this challenge makes preventing this violence more of a political issue than, for instance, eradicating polio. If ending intimate partner violence almost certainly requires transforming historic and deeply held social norms and power structures, what exactly does “scale up” mean? Who could or should undertake it?
Secondly, community mobilization approaches are likely effective precisely because of certain factors – among them, leadership by local activists and a central message of re-imagining power in society – that are difficult to reconcile with the realities of the public or private sectors that may be best placed to operate “at scale.” Ministries of health exist at least in part to support large-scale efforts to eradicate diseases, for instance; at least as yet, national governments don’t tend to feature Ministries of Dismantling the Patriarchy or Ministries of Gender Justice!
The authors of this study recognized that, at the outset, very little about these precise dilemmas had been written. As such, we set out to answer three guiding research questions at the heart of these dilemmas, with a balance of literature review and conversations with programmers who had faced similar challenges:
1. How have implementers of community mobilization initiatives attempted to “scale up” their efforts to shift attitudes about intimate partner violence and other socially and politically sensitive issues?
2. To what extent have any such approaches achieved success and effectiveness in “scaling up” to a national, regional, or international level?
3. What are the most salient obstacles, challenges, and lessons that have emerged from prior efforts to take these community mobilization approaches to scale?
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