ACDI/VOCA's Activate is a tool to walk project staff through six steps, resulting in an Social Behaviour Change strategy and M&E plan. First, Activate will provide a set of customizable behaviors with simple guidance on how to select and tailor those behaviors. After projects identify and customize these behaviors, they will have a clearer picture of which behaviors they are trying to change. Activate will then provide training curricula and guidance on barrier analysis and formative research, so that staff will understand how to collect data on drivers and barriers of those behaviors. It will also include a set of sequential decision-making process aides, guidance on best practices from behavioral sciences, and resources on Behavior Mapping to connect target behaviors to M&E processes.

1. SBC tool: ACTIVATE Advancing change theory into
vehicles activating Transformational energy
1. How will projects use this tool?
Social and behavior change (SBC) approaches posit change as a product of
intersecting influences at the individual, family, community, and social level. These
approaches guide project teams to think differently about human behavior, re-
consider its drivers and barriers, and address key behaviors through targeted
interventions. Projects and donors are increasingly interested in incorporating this
type of approach, but lack a comprehensive resource on how to develop an SBC
strategy.
The Activate tool walks project staff through six steps, resulting in an SBC strategy
and M&E plan. First, Activate provides a set of customizable behaviors with simple
guidance on how to select and tailor those behaviors. After projects identify and
customize these behaviors, they will have a clearer picture of which behaviors they
are trying to change. It is worth noting that in much of ACDI/VOCA’s current work,
projects do not even get to this step; many never even articulate their target
behaviors.
Activate then provides training curricula and guidance on barrier analysis and
formative research, so that that staff will understand how to collect data on drivers
and barriers of those behaviors. It also includes a set of sequential decision-making
process aides, guidance on best practices from behavioral sciences, and resources
on Behavior Mapping to connect target behaviors to M&E processes.
2. Who will be the primary user of this tool?
The primary user will be project technical staff, particularly agronomists or
production specialists, finance/market/investment specialists, CSA specialists,
gender specialists, and WASH/Nutrition specialists. M&E officers will also be
implicated. Because behavior change applies to a number of different sectors and
position levels, the tool can be used by any staff who want to encourage adoption of
specific behaviors within a project.
3. What gap does this tool address?
Many projects struggle to pinpoint key behaviors, and fail to understand the many
different ways in which they can more efficiently encourage adoption. While
Cultivate has helped agronomists hone in on specific behaviors, other sectors still
struggle to identify the observable and measurable practices that they want to see.
As a result, projects set out to change a huge, ambiguous set of practices without
ever identifying, articulating, or measuring the key behaviors that will lead to long
term change. An SBC approach helps projects pinpoint key behaviors, and test new

2. ways of encouraging them.
There are very few resources, however, that articulate a step-by-step process for
selecting behaviors, conducting formative research, and building behavior change
activities into project work plans and M&E. Existing resources, such as the
Designing for Behavior Change Framework and P- and C- Processes, suggest an
approach that is either very complicated, with extensive time spent selecting
behaviors and conducting formative research, or very isolated, with activities and
behaviors running parallel to the larger M&E project framework. The time that it
takes to develop a behavior change strategy – and the relative isolation in which
that strategy exists after it is developed – prevents projects from adopting a social
and behavior change approach. We need a nimbler, more user-friendly tool that
provides a clear roadmap for users to understand behavior selection, identify key
behaviors, get more information on them, and design activities that suit them.
4. What is the donor relevance?
Donors have historically only requested SBC components as an element of health
programming, and indeed in our DFAP models this request still stands. However, we
are seeing increasing numbers of RFPs ask for SBC and/or SBCC in new and
innovative ways; the Colombia Inclusion proposal, for instance, requested an SBC
strategy targeting inclusion behaviors, while the Malawi MADA proposal involved
an integrated SBCC platform across all sectors (agriculture, finance, gender, climate,
and nutrition and WASH). Two recent solicitations from USAID Guatemala suggest
that the mission will be increasingly interested in strong SBCC programming, which
is itself a component of an SBC strategy.
5. What are the components of this tool?
There are several core components of the SBC tool. These components will be
developed in two phases.
Phase 1:
1. Behavior Lists: This will be a set of behaviors for each sector and relevant
cross-cutting area, including Agriculture, horticulture, livestock, poultry,
WASH, nutrition, Gender, finance and investment, climate mitigation and
adaptation, and NRM.
2. Behavior Selection processes: We will use a scaling tool to help projects
select key project behaviors from the list. This tool essentially force ranks
behaviors in each of the sectors according to three elements: how many
indicators the behavior will affect, how much impact changing the behavior
will have, and how easy it will be to change the behavior.

3. 3. Formative research resources: There will be several components to the
formative research resources. These are:
a. Resources on Barrier Analysis Data Collection: there are already
several comprehensive resources on Barrier Analysis from TOPS and
Food for the Children. We will link to these in the tool, but will not
expound on them.
b. Barrier analysis training: A/V is in the process of developing a shorter,
more streamlined training on how to conduct a barrier analysis. This
curriculum will be refined for use in the field and included in the tool.
c. Barrier Analysis library: ACDI/VOCA has conducted several barrier
analyses that will become a part of the tool. We will encourage others
to upload barrier analyses in the future as an evolving part of the tool;
having our own library of barrier analyses will prevent duplication of
efforts in the future.
d. Resources on barrier analysis focus groups: no resources currently
exist on developing FGD tools that follow a barrier analysis format
(with questions that are based on the determinants). The tool will
include a template for FGD questions based on determinants, and
guidance on when to use FGDs instead of a full barrier analysis survey.
Phase 2:
4. A decision support tool for building activities. Under each behavior, this tool
will provide staff a space to record determinants identified in the formative
research step (above). Based on identified determinants, the tool will identify
a set of possible ways to address these determinants using behavior change
methodologies and best practices.
5. Guidance on best practices: We will draw on behavioral economics theory to
suggest additional steps that projects can implement to change behaviors.
These steps, which may take on the form of “tips” or may be more developed,
will help projects think about activity implementation and behavioral design.