What is Social and Behavior Change?

Social and Behavior Change (SBC) is a systematic, planned and evidence-based strategic process to promote positive and measurable individual behavior and social change. It is an integral and fundamental part of development and humanitarian programming and leverages on behavioral sciences such as psychology, sociology and anthropology. In this area of work, we answer integral questions such as

How do we change gender norms in a society?

How do we safeguard youth from risky behaviors?

How do we create social cohesion between different groups?

About me and sbc

I am a psychologist with 6 years of in-depth studies on human functioning and development, as well as on individual and groups drivers, cognitions, stereotypes, attitudes and behaviors. Throughout the past 6 years, I have translated this technical knowledge into applied developmental and humanitarian programming mainly through my experience with the United Nations International Children’s Fund (UNICEF), constituting the largest SBC institutional workforce that operates in over 190 countries, working as an SBC officer in UNICEF Lebanon and then a SBC specialist consultant to headquarters.

“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice - in practice there is”

- Yogi Berra

MY TOP AREAS OF INTEREST AND ACHIEVEMENT

Conceptual Frameworks, Theories of Change and strategy design

Answering the “why” is essential to program the “how”. I lead processes from developing conceptual frameworks, theories of changes, and strategy design.

Program Management

Having been an on-the-field SBC practitioner, I’ve led the program management cycle all the way from fundraising for funds, selecting partners, providing capacity building for these partners, implementing and monitoring the partners, and reporting back to donors.

monitoriNG

I work on creating extensive monitoring frameworks as well as simple on-the-ground filed quantitative and qualitative monitoring tools to measure different SBC constructs.

Development of sbc tools

I develop and roll-out different behaviorally-informed SBC tools.

Examples:

QUDWA | UNICEF Lebanon- set of tools to prevent child marriage, labor and violence against children and women

Education-Entertainment Toolkit for Disability Inclusion

The adventures of Jad and Tala | UNICEF Lebanon

Community Engagement, human-centered design and participatory approaches

The people best fit to identify and solve their problems are those who are living them. This encompasses everyone—vulnerable populations, refugees, children, individuals with disabilities, and more.

I facilitate processes that enable people to identify and articulate problems and solutions they want to see. This material would be the basis of strategy and intervention design.

capacity building and training

SBC almost always involves capacity building To know more about this, visit the educator page.