Before the lights went out, my social enterprise, DevelopMetrics, turned those tools loose on the USAID archive—one last look at what half a century of development really taught us. If you allocate grants, run programs, or shape policy, this is the closest thing we have to a postmortem on how tens of billions of dollars in development aid actually behaved over the course of decades in the wild. It offers a model for future learning on a mass scale, and the results affirm some important guiding principles as the development ecosystem considers how to build going forward.

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n this essay, Sherine Guirguis and Michael Coleman tell the story of the lesson that shaped their careers. It was a lesson that occurred while navigating a particularly challenging set of circumstances—how to deliver polio vaccines to children in remote areas of Pakistan under Taliban control.

Our latest capability “Ask Viamo Anything” is providing access to the latest AI technology to the digitally disconnected – at no cost to them. It was built and will soon be offered on the Viamo Platform. Ask Viamo Anything works on simple mobile phones without internet access. And because of its use of voice technology, it can even be used by people with low literacy — leapfrogging text-based approaches and truly democratizing access.

Linguistic accessibility is important because people in a group often speak more than one language with various degrees of confidence. People also use different varieties of the same language or create their own variety. The way a language develops in a multilingual group reflects what people need and want to communicate.

To do so, we propose a framework, which rearranges the 17 SDGs into five main categories to which concepts from behavioural and social scientists can relate: wellbeing, inclusivity, sufficiency, empowerment, and resilience (WISER; panel). The WISER framework can enable behavioural scientists to both design their interventions in a way that encompasses several SDGs, and to more clearly report and review how their interventions contribute to behavioural change towards SDGs, thus enhancing progress towards planetary health

Since the mid-2010s, chatbots have grown in usage and popularity across the humanitarian sector. While this usage has gained traction, there is scarce information on the collective successes, risks, and trade-offs of this automation. This research addresses this gap, documenting chatbot deployments across the humanitarian sector and exploring the existing uses, benefits, trade-offs and challenges of using chatbots in humanitarian contexts. Related Resources

Language has the power to reinforce or deconstruct systems of power that maintain poverty, inequality and suffering. As we are making commitments to decolonization in practice, it is important that we do not forget the role of language and communications in the context of inequality. The Inclusive Language Guide is a resource to support people in our sector who have to communicate in English to think about how the way they write can subvert or inadvertently reinforce intersecting forms of inequality that we work to end. The language recommended is drawn from specialist organizations which provide advice on language preferred by marginalized people, groups and communities, and by our own staff and networks, to support us to make choices that respectfully reflect the way they wish to be referred to. We want to support everyone to feel empowered to be inclusive in their work, because equality isn’t equality if it isn’t for everyone.

Evidence and Action Towards Safe and Nutritious Food (EatSafe) is looking to positively impact behavior around food safety practices in traditional markets around the world. As part of the program, Story Sourcing uses journalistic techniques to uncover stories and anecdotes from daily life that sheds light on people's motivations, fears, and aspirations. These stories, in turn, help guide the design and development of EatSafe food safety interventions. EatSafe previously conducted this work at traditional markets in Birnin Kebbi, Nigeria.

If you knew that Bengaluru’s informal waste pickers stopped over 38 crores kilograms of waste from reaching the landfills every year so the waste could be recycled, wouldn’t you feel like making song to celebrate it? We already did! #InvaluableRecyclers

Leveraging artificial intelligence (AI)–driven apps for health education and promotion can help in the accomplishment of several United Nations sustainable development goals. SnehAI, developed by the Population Foundation of India, is the first Hinglish (Hindi + English) AI chatbot, deliberately designed for social and behavioral changes in India. It provides a private, nonjudgmental, and safe space to spur conversations about taboo topics (such as safe sex and family planning) and offers accurate, relatable, and trustworthy information and resources.

In 2010, Colombia's defense minister contacted an ad agency to create an idea to demobilize FARC members, the oldest guerrilla army in Latin America. The agency, after spending over a year talking to nearly 100 of its members, learned two main things (1). -First, guerrilla members are ordinary men and women and not only guerrillas, a fact which is often forgotten after 60 years at war. -Secondly, they are more likely to demobilize during Christmas as it is a sensitive and emotional period. Based on these insights, they had a clever idea to put a Christmas tree in strategic walking paths in the middle of the jungle that would light up when someone passed by with a message promoting demobilization. The results? Three hundred thirty-one people who demobilized named this idea as one of the reasons to do so. Over the years, several campaigns from the same agency were quite successful, and overall, they were named in over 800 demobilizations. Causality, of course, cannot be established. Nevertheless, any measurable, non-violent efforts like this one are praised. Next time you think you have a difficult-to-reach customer, maybe think again!

Language data There is little information available on the languages crisis-affected people speak and understand. Humanitarians often develop communication strategies without reliable data on literacy, languages spoken, or preferred means of communication. The result too often is that crisis-affected people struggle to communicate with humanitarian organizations in a language they understand. Women, children, older people, and people with disabilities are often at the greatest disadvantage because they are less likely to understand international languages and lingua francas. TWB’s Language Data Initiative addresses those issues and provides important resources for humanitarians. It supports humanitarian organizations to develop language-informed programs and communication strategies. Click on a country on the map below to see language data, resources, and maps that we have available for that country. This map will update as new data is published in the future.

This website offers practical tools helping relief and development practitioners understand and tackle the barriers that prevent people from following the desired behaviours.

includes graphic compiling meanings of colors across cultures

This example demonstrates how the IRC’s Airbel Impact Lab integrates behavioral science and human-centered design to develop scalable solutions to humanitarian problems. On their own, these approaches have been leveraged in a variety of contexts across the world — what is unique about the Airbel approach is bringing them together.

HXLDash is a dashboard and online mapping tool designed for humanitarians and humanitarian contexts. HXLDash's aim is to make creating dashboards possible in less than 2 minutes by leveraging the power of the Humanitarian Exchange Language and linking to the common operation datasets.

We realized we were using insider language to describe innovation (as exemplified by internal blog post titles like “Using GIS Technology to Map Shelter Allocation in Azraq Refugee Camp”), rather than communicating what innovation looks like and the benefits it would bring to UNHCR staff (for example, “How UNHCR Used Creativity to Improve Journalistic Accuracy and Collaboration, One Step at a Time”). So, we hit the reset button and asked ourselves these four questions before crafting our internal communications strategy: What do we want to change? What do we want to be true that isn’t true right now? Whose behavior change is necessary to making that happen? Who has to do something (or stop doing something) they’re not doing now for us to achieve that goal? (This is about targeting a narrowly defined audience whose action or behavioral change is fundamental to your goal.) What would that individual or group believe if they took that action? In other words, what does that narrowly defined audience care about most, and how can we include that in our messages? How will we get that message in front of them? Where are their eyes?

Great examples of how behavioral insights have been applied to behavior change in India

2 excellent case studies

case studies

The Humanitarian Innovation Guide is a growing online resource to help individuals and organisations find their starting point and navigate the humanitarian innovation journey.