Complexity-Aware Monitoring, Evaluation & Learning for Social and Behavior Change Interventions

"With a complexity-aware MEL approach mutual trust and transparency strengthen practice..."

Social and behaviour change (SBC) projects are complex, operating at multiple and interconnected levels of the social ecology and physical environment. Activities may be implemented differently than planned, and individual stakeholders, including community members and implementers, may understand and respond to project activities differently. Understanding how projects operate in such complex environments, then, is critical to know how SBC projects affect communities (and vice versa) and ultimately, how projects achieve or do not achieve expected and sustained outcomes. In the context of supporting monitoring, evaluation & learning (MEL) activities, CORE Group's SBC Working Group has developed a set of complexity-aware tools are intended to help design and evaluate SBC-focused interventions.

Tools in this set include:

1. An advocacy brief [8 pages, PDF], written by Anna Martin and Katrina Mitchell, designed to help guide communication with donors and to help build fluency in communicating how to monitor and evaluate SBC interventions;
2. A SBC Complexity Indicators Matrix (SCIM) [36 pages, PDF], written by Paul Shelter Fast, Susan Igras, and Joseph Petraglia, with quantitative and qualitative indicators related to adaptation, learning, and collaboration that can be used in proposals and work plans; and
3. A checklist [4 pages, PDF], written by Lenette Golding, intended to help in the consistency and completeness of documenting SBC interventions. It is organised according to the major ways in which complexity affects most SBC interventions:
   • Contextual complexity: The environment and implementation process itself shape outcomes of an intervention.
   • Temporal complexity: Interventions evolve over time as intended populations and implementers change behaviours and come to new understandings and as programmatic environments shift in response to new constraints, opportunities, and priorities.
   • Interpretive complexity: As interventions are social activities, practitioners should acknowledge that every stakeholder understands the intervention partially and differently and has a unique perspective.

The SBC Working Group contributes to improved maternal and child health outcomes by strengthening the capacity of CORE members to design and implement effective SBC strategies while documenting and disseminating experiences.