Inclusive, accessible social behaviour change: what it is and how to do it | Blogs

Promoting healthy and inclusive behaviors and social norms is vital to our work at Sightsavers to protect sight and fight for the rights of people with disabilities.

Behaviors driven by stigma, negative stereotypes and discriminatory attitudes present a major obstacle to people with disabilities being able to access equal rights in society.

The field of social behavior change (SBC) helps address this. Inclusive and accessible SBC means:

• We work with partners to ensure processes are disability inclusive
• We design accessible materials and activities for people with various disabilities
• We use SBC to reduce the stigma faced by people with disabilities, including mental health conditions.

At Sightsavers, we have embarked on a journey to learn and increase our expertise in the field of inclusive and accessible social behavior change.

what we have done

We have built a team that focuses on social behavior change, including SBC regional technical leads in East and West Africa and an inclusive design lead. The team brings together our SBC skills and experience across all of the organization’s work, from inclusive design to accessible delivery.

We have developed an SBC toolkit with practical tools to help build staff capacity and confidence. The toolset is compatible with everyone from project managers and country directors to fundraisers and monitoring staff.

We have created an SBC Community of Practice which is a virtual space for Sightsavers staff to collaborate and share experiences and learning about SBC. Within this community (which meets monthly), we have used learning questions such as: “What are the most effective ways to reduce disability stigma?” to help discuss what is working well and what is not in our different thematic areas and countries.

As we have gone through this process, we have gained knowledge and confidence. We are making inclusive and accessible SBC an integrated element in an increasing number of our projects and leading our partners and other development organizations to do the same.