Media Action Insight Blog Feed

Designing for inclusion: From invisible to #Invaluables

2022-08-30T12:05:30+00:00

Cities tend to forget the very people who are their lifeline.

The 12.5 million denizens of Bengaluru, known as India’s Silicon Valley, generate 5,757 metric tonnes of solid waste per day.

But the city’s estimated 30,000 informal waste pickers, who form the backbone of Bengaluru’s waste management system, are invisible and ignored. They live in deplorable conditions with low and unstable incomes, face significant workplace hazards, and are treated with suspicion and contempt.

Funded by the H&M Foundation, Saamuhika Shakti (SaaS, the Collective Impact Initiative), aims to address this situation. ��tv Media Action, an initiative programme partner, turned to social media to create our Pathway to Respect, Identity, Dignity and Empowerment (PRIDE) project for informal waste pickers.

An informal waste picker who featured in our #Invaluables campaign

Lack of recognition

The PRIDE project’s formative research revealed that there is a lack of recognition of the humans behind the process of waste management. While people in the city see waste on the streets, and they are concerned about it, they failed to list waste pickers as important to their lives. On further probing, we found that while people appreciated the work of formal waste collectors, who are hired by the municipality for door-to-door garbage collection, informal waste pickers were still stigmatised. More than half of our study respondents said that informal waste pickers are dirty and shouldn’t be allowed inside residential building complexes.

Street rag-pickers look scary, so we don't go near them!

- Female, 39, housewife, Bengaluru

The pandemic strengthened these negative perceptions. Waste pickers, in turn, confirmed having to regularly deal with discrimination.

’They (the public) scold us. They feel they will catch the disease (COVID-19) from us. They think we have the virus. So, I do not like to go to work.’’

- Female waste picker, under 18

Research was used to identify segments within social media users among the general population of Bengaluru, based on their attitudes towards informal waste pickers. Our research and analysis showed three broad segments of people:

Appreciators, who valued the role and contributions of informal waste pickers and understood their circumstances
Sympathisers, who displayed an overall sentimentality towards informal waste pickers accompanied by stereotyping of their work
Stigmatisers, who wanted to distance themselves from the waste picking community and displayed extremely negative attitudes

The project decided to focus on appreciators and sympathisers, who were more likely to become early adopters of any changes in attitude or behaviour.

Strategic reframing

In a country with a history of caste-based occupations and discrimination, bringing a change in mindsets is uphill work. The project turned to Professor Judith Butler to understand why some lives are valued and others not, and how marginalisation is contingent on rendering social groups virtually invisible.

Based on the reading of Butler and formative research, the project’s Theory of Change focused on the need to end the invisibility of informal waste pickers if their lives and work were to be properly valued. This involved a reframing of the work of waste pickers as involving special skills and productive labour essential for the city’s survival, as well as recognition of the fragility of social media users’ own lives in the face of environmental hazards. The recognition of this shared fragility is a pathway to creating a social bond that obliges us to care for each other. Establishing the interconnectedness between the lives of social media users and the work of waste pickers was integral to the former valuing the life and work of the latter.

Designing for PRIDE

The project used social media to connect the people of Bengaluru with informal waste pickers, by positioning the waste pickers as ’invaluable friends’, friends they did not know they had. The creative strategy was designed to lift the shroud of invisibility and open the eyes of Bengalureans to the value that informal waste pickers bring to their lives - as professionals, as humans, and as residents living side-by-side in the same city.

A social experiment film explored the concept of friendship and revealed how informal waste pickers share the values normally associated with true friendships. The social experiment was conducted by Radhika Narayan, a popular actor and social media influencer. The film ended with a call to action to join a moderated private community on Facebook called the #Invaluables Facebook group.

Participants in our #Invaluables social media experiment were asked who their dearest friends were - then shown how informal waste pickers fit the description. /��tv Media Action India

The content posted on this group brought Bengalureans closer to the waste picking community, by creating awareness and demonstrating the value of their work to save the city from being buried under a mountain of garbage, and therefore demonstrating their interconnectedness.

Crafting this journey of perception change required a steady stream of relevant content through the week, seizing every opportunity and fact in a strategic manner and converting it into engaging content that would bring this interconnectedness to life. We built the social media strategy carefully, weaving in the use of influencers wherever necessary and taking the conversations beyond social media to discussions on FM radio during regular shows, hosted by prominent city RJs.

The branding, Invaluables, was designed to strengthen the idea of ‘interconnectedness’. The brand identity uses image, colour and text to combine three graphic ideas – the joining of two hands, the use of two eco-friendly colours - blue and green - and the skyline symbolising the city of Bengaluru.

Analysis and impact

Social media statistics show that the first phase of the #Invaluables content reached at least 2.6 million unique people, 21% of the city’s population, with a total of 4.4 million video views and 509,429 engagements (e.g. likes, comments).

The first round of impact evaluation also shows that we have started to shift people’s understanding of waste pickers. There was an improvement in spontaneous awareness of different segments of informal waste pickers, from 10% at baseline to 16% among those exposed to the #Invaluables content. There was no such change within the control group. Analysis also shows greater discussion about informal waste pickers, their work and place in society among those exposed (60%) to the content, compared to those not exposed (49%).

We have demonstrated that an evidence-based, insight-driven, carefully crafted social media campaign can help shift negative perceptions attached to certain occupations and help reduce inequalities. With significant positive shifts in awareness and discussions about informal waste pickers after the first phase of the campaign, we are now confident in taking forward the idea of Invaluables to the next phase of building understanding and appreciation for the critical importance of their work.

Our next phase will demonstrate the connection between the people of Bengaluru and the city’s waste pickers - and why everyone should be aware of and celebrate a Happy Number.

Check out the Happy Number to learn more.

Varinder Kaur Gambhir is director of research, Soma Katiyar is executive creative director and Ragini Pasricha is director of content strategy at ��tv Media Action India.

Learn more about our Invaluables project here: /mediaaction/where-we-work/asia/india/invaluables/

Read our press release about the Happy Number here: /mediaaction/where-we-work/asia/india/happy-number-invaluables/

The Invaluables project is part of the Saamuhika Shakti (collective impact) initiative, funded by the H&M Foundation.

How poo became one of our biggest creative challenges yet

2022-06-20T15:33:12+00:00

How many of us ever think about what happens after we flush?

Yet it’s an issue that concerns governments, sanitation experts, urban planners and public health specialists around the world - particularly in India, where 60% of urban India is not connected to modern sewage systems and relies on on-site sanitation such as septic tanks and leaching pits. This makes faecal sludge management (FSM) a pressing but hidden public health issue.

That’s why five years ago, Madhu Krishna, then deputy director of WASH and communities at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation India, gave ��tv Media Action this challenge:

“Could you make faecal sludge management an issue that is as important to people in urban India as air pollution has become? Could you get people to care about what happens after they pull the flush?”

Few homes in India's urban areas are connected to municipal sewerage, making waste management a major health issue. Credit: ��tv Media Action

Since the launch of the ambitious Swachh Bharat Mission (Clean India Mission) in October 2014, India has made huge leaps forward in building toilets and eradicating open defecation. But faecal sludge management - or what happens to poo after you flush, how it is contained, when to empty the tank and where it ends up - was not getting as much thought as it deserves.

An invisible problem

Our research showed that the predominant attitude among our audiences was to flush and forget about faecal sludge, or avoid the problem for as long and by any means possible – including by building enormous septic tanks that do not need cleaning in their lifetimes. As one man from Trichy in the southern state of Tamil Nadu told us: ‘’I have built a big tank so that we don’t have to clean in frequent intervals. Why should I empty the tank if there is still so much space?”

According to a 2019 WaterAid report, adequate facilities and services for the collection, transportation, treatment and disposal of faecal sludge do not exist in most Indian cities. Private operators – often using illegal, manual methods – may even dump faecal sludge in drains, waterways, and on land. This untreated sewage contributes to high levels of diarrhoeal disease, which is responsible for more than one in 10 infant deaths in India. Faecal sludge is the largest polluter of ground water in urban India.

Our mandate was clear: how do we first make faecal sludge a problem you cannot ignore? How do we make the invisible, visible?

Our campaign #FlushKeBaad illustrated the sanitation value chain so that people could understand what happens after flushing. Credit: ��tv Media Action

Combining the art of drama with behavioural science

We examined our audience’s attitudes towards desludging, and the type of containment system they own, to help us identify three audience segments: proactive desludgers (22%), reactive desludgers (the majority – 66%), and connected to drains (11%).

We knew people weren’t making ‘optimal’ decisions when it came to sanitation and septic tanks. In fact, they departed from what traditional economic theory would classify as ‘perfect’ rationality in specific and predictable ways. For example, many focused on the short-term gains (e.g. not paying for regular desludging), and ignored both the long-term benefits (e.g. protecting water resources and ensuring the well-being of families and communities) and uncertain future costs (e.g. repairs or system failure).

Behavioural economists call this ‘present bias’. We needed to reach these ‘procrastinators’ as well as those who hadn’t thought about what happens after they flush. We also set out to frame the link between faecal sludge disposal and health as a positive gain, because we know people's choices are heavily influenced by inertia and avoiding losses.

We wanted to increase awareness about correct FSM practices – regular desludging, building the right kind of septic tank and asking where your poo is being dumped - and to heighten the sense of risk.

The drama focused on two triggers or framing effects – risk perception and social disapproval - which would make urban populations take either individual or collective action to bring about change.

Why drama?

Everyone likes a good story – particularly in India with its rich oral history and huge film and television industry. Working with national broadcasters gives drama unparalleled reach and scale. And we know drama works - it can be an incredibly powerful force for positive social impact.

But we don’t mean ANY drama. We mean locally produced, culturally relevant dramas that are developed using behavioural insights and informed by communication theory. These dramas are tested with audiences before they go to air, to ensure they deliver on engagement, entertainment and communication objectives.

Evidence demonstrates these carefully crafted narratives - sometimes called edutainment or drama for development - not only inform, educate and entertain. They can also prompt discussion, influence and challenge social norms, inspire intent to act and change behaviour.

Drama can be particularly effective because it engages people on an emotional level, unpacking complex issues and making them easier to understand, so they stick in people’s minds. Role-modelling positive behaviours over time can change mindsets – even around deep-seated behaviours and norms.

“Academics have demonstrated the link between what we see and how we behave. Narratives have the power to shape our mind and action. Navrangi Re! through powerful storytelling demonstrated that narratives can aid in unpacking a complex subject like faecal sludge management, and increase cognitive understanding of related actions. Narratives can introduce role models, new ways of working, frames of reference, and novel ways of decision making, which when emulated by people establish new norms in a subtle and acceptable manner.”

- Archna Vyas, Deputy Director, Communications, India Country Office, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Pulling off two ‘firsts’

Taking these behavioural insights, we did two things no one had tried before in India.

First, we developed a public-private partnership around a drama on a social issue. While India has a long history of using using drama for social and behaviour change, it had always been in association with the public broadcaster, Doordarshan - not the private sector.

And then, we did what some might deem crazy: We created India’s first – and possibly the world’s first – drama on faecal sludge management.

The main characters in our hit comedy-drama, Navrangi Re! Credit: ��tv Media Action

The art and craft: our neighbourhood and our characters

Navrangi Re! (Nine to a Shade) is the story of an urban neighbourhood – a mohalla - where lots of different people live cheek by jowl. Through the trials and tribulations of life in an urban jungle, they find ways to overcome this constant crisis mode. The mohalla is a creative device to accommodate an entire socio-economic microcosm, with different families occupying different points on the sanitation value chain.

The lead protagonist, Vishwas, is a struggling TV journalist whose name means trust. His love interest – Chitralekha – is an aspiring bureaucrat, preparing to take her entrance exams. They represent two contrasting approaches to working with communities – she is authoritarian, he is a negotiator. It is the marriage of the two approaches that leads to a community transforming. Chitralekha and her father, retired army man Gajraj – do everything right: they have a toilet with a proper septic tank that they desludge regularly. Gajraj represents the ‘proactive deludger’ segment from our research.

Their neighbour, Motichoor, named after a favourite Indian sweetmeat, is the stingy, slippery neighbourhood confectioner. He has a toilet but no septic tank, letting poo out into open drains – a source of high-decibel neighbourhood conflict. He represents the segment of those connected to open drains.

Rajrani – the name means empress – is the local ‘don’. She and her son Kabaadi Seth, or scrap mogul, represent the ‘reactive desludgers’ segment. They have a palatial home with a toilet and a septic tank, but they have never desludged their tank.

There are others like Naseer the tailor, his wife and son, who use Seelan Deewar – the damp and decrepit community toilet, which is owned and tightly controlled by Rajrani. And there is Lota, the mohalla errand boy – whose name means the ubiquitous water container that people use to clean up when they defecate.

The mohalla and the characters are based on insights from our formative research, reflecting real desires, values, self-image, sense of pride and dignity and aspirations for a better life. Navrangi Re! has all the elements you would expect from a prime-time drama – romance, humour, conflict, pathos, villainy and even a talking wall!

Did the risk pay off?

Yes! At the end of 13 weeks, Navrangi Re! had reached 59.6 million unique viewers through three Viacom18 channels and its OTT platform. It was viewed equally by men and women across all age bands. It was also ranked among the Top 20 shows on General Entertainment Channels at 9 pm, as per data from the Broadcast Audience Research Council of India (BARC). We were delighted – and a little relieved – that we had taken faecal sludge management mainstream!

A novel evaluation approach

An independent evaluation provided some really powerful results.

Evaluating media - particularly popular, wide-reaching programmes - can be very difficult. The Navrangi Re! evaluation estimated impact in a real-world setting. It identified households who watched Rishtey – the TV channel airing Navrangi Re! – at any time of the day. Not all households who watched the channel would end up watching the show – but there was a high degree of similarity between households who watched and those that didn’t.

This approach identified households to be interviewed before and after the show aired – and they were retrospectively allocated to treatment and control groups, based on whether they watched Navrangi Re!. In this way, it was possible to compare outcomes among those exposed to the TV show with those unexposed in the panel of 2,959 respondents.

Researchers found that 37% of those who watched at least one episode showed intent to do something about their faecal sludge, rising to 78% of those who had watched at least seven episodes. There were significant improvements on audience’s attitudes towards regular desludging, willingness to save to pay for this, and a desire to improve the quality of existing septic tanks.

Researchers also found that viewers engaged emotionally, with 78% of viewers saying that they felt happy after watching Navrangi Re!, and more than two-thirds said that they would like to watch more episodes in the future. The show was particularly successful at stimulating conversations between viewers and their family and friends on faecal sludge management.

The impact evaluation showed that storytelling can help bring about social and behavioural change on a hard-to-address topic like FSM. Our follow-up, seven-episode web drama called Life Navrangi has just released on YouTube. It continues Vishwas’s story and the conversation on urban sanitation in India.

“FSM is not only an infrastructural issue but also a socio-cultural issue. It is critical to acknowledge the need for FSM because it has a considerable impact on public health, climate, and environmental pollution. Navrangi Re! opened our eyes to the role of media and storytelling in combatting this public health crisis and we welcome this second series with new and exciting storylines.”

- Professor V S Chary, Director, Urban Governance and Environment, Administrative Staff College of India, CEO, Wash Innovation Hub

Three lessons learned

We hope Navrangi Re! can inspire others to use innovative partnerships to leverage the creative power of narratives. Only by making invisible social problems such as urban sanitation visible will we really see greater public engagement.

When we combine the science, art and craft in this way using our Narrative Engagement Model, three key principles are vital:

We must root storytelling in behavioural insights and theory;
We must commit to immersing the creative approach in ‘people’s lived experiences’ of the issue, and
Most importantly, we must have an unwavering focus on ‘entertainment first’

Because after all, everyone loves a good story - even one about poo!

The cast of Life Navrangi - our follow-up to Navrangi Re! Credit: ��tv Media Action

Varinder Kaur Gambhir is India Director of Research; Radharani Mitra is Global Creative Advisor and Anna Godfrey is Head of Evidence.

Our followup series to Navrangi Re! - Life Navrangi - is now live on YouTube! Subscribe to Channel Navrangi and don't miss an episode (in Hindi with English subtitles).

Learn more about the Navrangi project, and its independent evaluation (third party site).

Learn more about our work in India.

The faults, fissures and connections between media development and social and behaviour change communication

2018-05-21T08:00:00+00:00

This year’s World Press Freedom Day celebrations were two weeks after the largest ever conference focused on Social and Behaviour Change communication (SBCC). The two worlds, which I sometimes uncomfortably straddle, have a history of not connecting.

The SBCC Summit had a broad agenda, ranging from mass media outputs to reduce maternal mortality to behavioural economics and artificial intelligence. The relationship between those using media in these ways and those supporting independent journalism has been a source of tension and disagreement over decades. But as support to both independent media and social and behaviour change communication (also called “communication for development”) appears to be growing, including in donor strategies, it is worth asking whether this tension is really justified.

The disagreements work in both directions, but if we are to achieve the concerted and connected action necessary to support healthy democratic information and communication environments in the 21st century we must avoid unnecessary arguments. This is one we need to get over.

Often independent media organisations in developing countries see social and behaviour change communication as instrumental and, at worst, actively undermining them. They sometimes resent the appropriation of broadcast airwaves and news pages with paid for messages apparently telling people what to do and what to think. They resent large budgets spent trying to “train journalists” to write on favoured issues of development NGOs and donors with little or no investment going to the institutions and journalistic architecture necessary to support a strong media sector. They feel journalism exists to hold all actors in society to account, especially those with power and money which includes many development actors, so they are cautious about attempts to “get them on board” with a development communication agenda.

Social and behaviour change communication practitioners have their own concerns. They witness the issues they see as crucial to saving lives routinely sensationalised and misrepresented in journalistic reporting in ways that increase stigma, prejudice and fear. Whether the issue is domestic violence or HIV, malaria or safe handwashing, preparation against natural disaster or getting girls into school, they see much to be gained from encouraging better journalism and public communication around issues which are matters of life and death to millions. They are baffled by the resistance to these efforts by some media development actors.

I have found myself at different times vehemently agreeing with each side. Working with ��tv Media Action colleagues on a policy briefing on the media of Nepal recently, the level of anger we found directed at international NGOs - for what many journalists considered substantial capture of the broadcast airwaves - was acute. They complained bitterly that international paid for content of little relevance or resonance to communities was taking the place of local issues and voices. What the Nepali media – including community media – needed, they said, was funding so that they could be what they should be, not the mouthpieces of international development actors.

On the other hand, I spent much time in the 1980s and 1990s working with others to raise public understanding of HIV/AIDS issues in the countries where the virus was spreading most rapidly. Media coverage in these countries was often deeply damaging to the response especially in its stigmatisation of people with HIV/AIDS. Worse still, there were cases where even serious news organisations in the West denied the links between HIV and AIDS. I think some of this reporting had a real chilling effect which prevented policy action focusing on HIV for some time. An epidemic of roughly 4 million people being infected in the mid-1980s transmuted into a pandemic of almost 30 million by the time affordable treatments became available in the early 2000s. To this day I get irritated by media development organisations talking about social and behaviour change communication as being all about “AIDS messaging” when the best organisations responding to the pandemic were as focused on generating voice and dialogue as they were on information provision.

There are examples of work across both fields that show I am not the only one to see these divides as unhelpful.
Leading media development organisations like the Gabriel Garcia Marquez Foundation (Foundation for a new IberoAmerican Journalism), ANDI or AMARC have a clear focus on achieving social change and advancing development objectives. Most media development organisations justify their receipt of development funding by arguing that they contribute to improved development outcomes – even if that is couched in terms of improving accountability or social cohesion. A central thrust of media development action in recent years has been to position independent media as a key concern of international development actors, including concerted (and successful) advocacy by organisations like the Global Forum for Media Development to get the issue integrated into the Sustainable Development Goals.

And the “SBCC” field increasingly recognises that change happens through dialogue, debate and action rather than messaging. Two decades ago, the “SBCC” field was a “BCC” one focused largely on achieving individual level behaviour changes. The “Social” is now centre stage as we understood that improvements in family planning owed more to the women’s liberation movement than it did to improved awareness of contraception, that preventing the spread of HIV owed more to the empowerment and action of those affected by the virus than it did to communication around wearing condoms. Today, communication is increasingly about social change whether in the form of the #MeToo movement, new forms of identity politics, or communities in Sierra Leone organising themselves to plan for when Ebola might strike. Debate and dialogue requires healthy, independent information and communication spaces.

There is also increased recognition in the SBCC field that techniques to achieve shifts in behaviour are becoming ever more sophisticated and effective. Behavioural economics provides a powerful positive addition to the options of approaches available but the role of Cambridge Analytica and the capacity to meld advances in behavioural psychology with big data and online communication provide deeply concerning prospects for what “social and behavioural change” might look like in the future. So the SBCC field is increasingly focused on developing clear ethical frameworks for its work and leading the debate on “who decides” what norms get shifted and which behaviours get changed.

An emphasis on people is a key way to bridge these divides. Media development actors believe that people need information and platforms for public debate to take and influence the decisions that shape their lives. So too do social and behaviour change communication actors. The former may mostly focus on, for example, decisions around how to exercise democratic rights (most obviously around electoral choices). The latter may focus on having the information to decide to decide to have your child vaccinated against polio. These may sound very different arenas but let’s take polio. The principal challenge of eradicating polio in recent years has not been a lack of a vaccine, a functioning system to deliver that vaccine or lack of public awareness. In a small number of countries it has been rumours and misconceptions – often fanned through social media –that the vaccine is a Western plot. Ultimately, efforts to eradicate polio rest on access to information that the people most affected by an issue can trust and relate to their lives. That is the preserve as much of media development as it is of social and behaviour change communication.

There are encouraging signs of improved organisation within these fields and across them. On the media development side, the Global Forum for Media Development has become an increasingly effective and organised network of media development actors working together to improve the credibility, effectiveness and importance of the field. A new alliance – the “Global Alliance for Social and Behaviour Change Communication: building informed and engaged societies” has been formed through the leadership of several organisations, especially Unicef and the Communication Initiative (my organisation is or will be a member of both). I hope that an agreement will be reached to at least connect and cooperate with each other.

James Deane is Director of Policy and Research at ��tv Media Action. He is also on the international steering committee of the Global Forum for Media Development and on the advisory board of the Communication Initiative. He is an adviser to the OECD Development Assistance Committee Governance Network focused on improving donor coordination around media assistance and has provided strategic support to networks of philanthropic organisations focused on media support.

What to expect from the biggest ever summit on social and behaviour change communication

2018-04-12T17:04:30+00:00

Twelve hundred people will gather in Indonesia next week (16-20 April) for the grandly titled International Social and Behaviour Change Communication Summit, an event that could have a significant impact on meeting the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The SDGs were negotiated, agreed, and will be implemented largely by governments. But their successful implementation will depend on what people do, what they think, and how they organise themselves. This is what the Summit will focus on. The health goal (Goal 3) envisages a dramatic drop in maternal mortality. That will require, as well as resourcing more antenatal clinics, more pregnant women attending, and being empowered to attend, those clinics.

The education goal includes a commitment to get children, especially girls, to go to school. That means hiring teachers and building more schools but it also means shifting the social norms that often mean that boys are privileged over girls when it comes to education. Similar issues accompany other goals. Doubling agricultural productivity means farmers knowing about, and understanding how to cultivate, new seed varieties. Reducing the numbers of deaths in a disaster depends on people knowing how best to protect themselves and their family when disaster strikes.

In order to shift harmful norms, change behaviour and amplify the voice of those who have most to win or lose from development action, we need to understand what people already know, how they communicate and how they can make their perspectives best heard. This is what the summit will focus on.

��tv Media Action was, together with Unicef, the Soul City Institute for Social Justice, and the Communication Initiative, invited by Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs (JHUCCP), to co-organise the Summit. It has been a tremendous example of collective action with excellent leadership from JHUCCP.

Three reasons why the summit matters

1. We know that, just as good communication is vital to improving lives, bad communication can kill. We saw examples of bad communication in the early stages of the Ebola epidemic in 2014, which made the situation far worse. It was only when people started getting the right information, in ways that enabled them to make the best plans for themselves, that the epidemic started to be contained. Like our co-organisers, we believe passionately that we need disciplined fora that help us as a sector understand what works and it is why we have called this the “what works summit”. The summit will be an intense, probably exhausting, opportunity to take a view on what is working and not working in supporting communication to save lives.

2. This work is in danger of being "siloed" and disorganised. There are many different ways of using communication from the kinds of approaches that we will be presenting on (see below) to new innovations in behavioural economics to new digital strategies and much else besides. It is vital for people engaged in these different endeavours to talk, connect and learn from each other. This is a second key objective of the conference.

3. We need to examine who sets the agenda for this work. The term “social and behaviour change communication” may sound like an effort to tell people what to do. But at the heart of this work is the opposite - enabling people to understand, discuss and work out for themselves what is in their best interests and how they can protect themselves and their communities and families. We will be discussing too how to make sure that it is people, not just governments or development agencies, who shape the future agenda for this work.

James Deane is director of policy and research at ��tv Media Action

See a list of sessions featuring ��tv Media Action at the 2018 International Social and Behaviour Change Communication Summit