Social and behaviour change

For far too many children, the deprivations in their lives are manifestations of deep-rooted power imbalances and ideologies expressed through harmful practices and discriminatory customs.

This underlying inequality, discrimination and exclusion violate child rights and can have lasting effects on children’s well-being, even in places where nutrition, health care, protection and education services are readily available.

In these situations, protecting children’s rights means changing social structures and environments.

To diagnose and analyse the drivers of harmful attitudes and behaviours, UNICEF Office of Strategy and Evidence – Innocenti focusses on the importance of social and behaviour change. Our research in this area seeks to help change social norms and behaviours so that children stay in school, receive all vaccinations, live healthy lifestyles and are able to practice good sanitation and hygiene. We also look at how social and behaviour change approaches can eliminate violence against children.

For example, our research has shown that parenting programmes informed by social and behaviour change can effectively reduce violence against children by parents in low- and middle-income countries. With the BIRD Lab, a partnership with the UNICEF Programme Group, we have created a collaborative virtual space for experimentation and innovation in behavioural sciences to achieve results for children.

Ultimately, our social and behaviour change research seeks to understand and test solutions while scaling up methods and implementation research in UNICEF programming.