Our approach

The National Sanitation Campaign has incorporated Behavior Centred Design (BCD) into its structure (see figure 1 below). Developed by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, BCD follows fives steps: Assess, Build, Create, Deliver and Evaluate the program. BCD is based on the best available science on what determines behaviour in real-world contexts, known as ‘behaviour settings’. These are small-scale situations that achieve some objective, (such as a sports game, meal-time, business meeting or bus trip). BCD also recognizes that most behaviour is motivated by one or more of fifteen human motives, such as hunger, love, status, affiliation and curiosity.

The consequences of behaviour are changes in the state-of-the-world, such as better health or human dignity.

The BCD theory of change (in the middle of figure 1) sets out the minimum chain of causes and effects that must occur for behaviour to change, so as to produce the desired impact. Reading from the left of figure 1, the task is to design an intervention that can be implemented as some change to the environment which causes the target audience to experience surprise, leading to changes in their brains (mostly in the form of a changed level of motivation or interest, expressed as a revaluation of the target behaviour), which, in turn, causes them to behave differently in some behaviour setting (that is, engage in performance).

Exposure to the campaign component typically occurs in a known behaviour setting, such as a community event, while the target behaviour – in this case, constructing and using improved sanitation facilities – occurs in settings around the home.

One problem is ensuring that the revaluation of the target behaviour which occurs in the exposure setting (e.g., being excited by a new idea, such as that toilets can be considered modern) is maintained until it comes time to actually engage in the target behaviour, which can be sometime later (e.g., when it comes time to build and use an improved toilet).