Evaluation of UNICEF investments towards institutional strengthening for social and behaviour change
How does social and behaviour change (SBC) help UNICEF achieve positive results for children? How has UNICEF's SBC capacity and programming quality developed in recent years?
Social and behaviour change (SBC) is an approach that applies the social and behavioural sciences to understand the needs of individuals and communities in order to develop context-specific, people-centred solutions for the barriers that impede positive change.
In recent years, UNICEF has increasingly integrated SBC into its programming across the development and humanitarian contexts. In the UNICEF Strategic Plan 2022-2025, community engagement and social and behaviour change is designated for the first time as one of the organization’s core change strategies. This repositioning builds on many years of investment in SBC within UNICEF, including a strategic shift from what the organization had previously referred to as Communication for Development (C4D) to SBC, with a greater emphasis on the importance of social and behavioural sciences and expansion beyond primarily communications-focused approaches to those that address system-level barriers to change.
To assess the impact of the investments on UNICEF’s SBC institutional capacity and its ability to deliver better quality SBC programming and to provide recommendations to further strengthen the use of SBC as a change strategy, the UNICEF Evaluation Office commissioned an independent evaluation, in collaboration with the SBC team in the Programme Group.
