Complexity-Aware Monitoring, Evaluation & Learning for Social and Behavior Change Interventions

In by Avani Duggaraju

ORGANIZATION CORE Group

YEAR PUBLISHED 2021

DESCRIPTION

CORE Group’s Social and Behavior Change (SBC) Working Group has developed a set of complexity-aware tools are designed to help design and evaluate SBC-focused interventions. Tools in this set include:

  1.  An advocacy brief  to help guide communication with donors and to help build fluency in communicating how to monitor and evaluate SBC interventions
  2.  A core set of indicators related to adaptation, learning, and collaboration that can be used in proposals and work plans
  3. A checklist intended to help in the consistency and completeness of documenting SBC interventions.

Complexity is a key factor—perhaps the key factor—in social and behavior change (SBC) programming. Complexity affects most SBC interventions through:

  • Contextual complexity; the fact that the environment and implementation process itself shape outcomes of an intervention.
  • Temporal complexity; interventions evolve over time as target population and implementers change behaviors, and come to new understandings, and programmatic environments shift in response to new constraints, opportunities and priorities.
  • Interpretive complexity; as interventions are social activities, practitioners should acknowledge that every stakeholder understands the intervention partially and differently and has a unique perspective

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