Bringing behavioural insights to scale in the United Nations

In their welcoming remarks Cynthia McCaffrey, Director, UNICEF Office of Innovation and Abdoulaye Mar Dieye, Director, Bureau for Policy Programmes Support, UNDP, highlighted the importance of this.

“We are always looking for innovative approaches and tools to foster social and behaviour change. BI is one of the newest tools that we have started to look at, particularly through its integration in communication for development interventions,” said McCaffrey during her opening.

“Partnerships with governments and local academia is the cornerstone of how UNICEF works. In this context, we have just begun exploring the type of capacity development needs in-house to see how BI could be used to achieve our corporate results; and with partners, as part of our local capacity development efforts on accelerating evidence-informed social and behaviour change,” she adds. 

“Behavioural Insights in the development context can be understood as a two-pillar approach. The first pillar consists of investing in context-specific behavioural drivers and barriers, while leveraging insights from behavioural science. The second pillar entails designing experiments that are based on rigorous monitoring and evaluation systems”, said UNDP’s Mar Dieye. 

“For the past four years, we invested in a portfolio of country-based experiments, with the generous support of the Government of Denmark. We designed and scaled behaviourally-informed interventions to address environmental protection in China and Mongolia, to address gender-based violence in Egypt, Georgia, and South Africa, to increase tax compliance in Moldova and Armenia and to improve our cash-transfer system to poor households in Bangladesh – to name a few.”

During Prof. Sunstein’s keynote lecture, the fundamentals of the innovative BI approach were introduced, and examples of their practical applications were presented to illustrate how BI application can benefit programme designers and implementers. The key message: our choices are heavily influenced by cognitive biases and heuristics as well as the choice architectures that frame decision-making. How to design the architecture for decision-making and bridging intention to action was one of the key questions of the first collaboration between UNDP and the UK Behavioural Insights Team, starting in 2013. In Moldova, many adults treated for tuberculosis stop taking their medication and relapse, negatively impacting the individual’s health and the national economy. One of the main barriers was that people had to make a mandatory visit to a clinic to take the drugs in the presence of a doctor: a friction cost. Results from a randomized control trial indicate that twice as many patients follow through with treatment if allowed to take medication at home while connected to a doctor or nurse through their phone camera – 87 percent compared to 43 percent in the control group.

A panel discussion followed where panelists examined why the BI approach matters for the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals and how new ways of working can be introduced in the UN Development System.