Editor’s choice
SEI initiatives explore key issues on sustainable development and serve as hubs for our research. The SEI Initiative on Behavoiur and Choice examined what drives people to change their behaviour when it comes to adopting technology or changing of daily practices in the context of development solutions. The early focus of the initiative was on household energy, with case studies examining the drivers of behaviour linked to clean cookstove adoption. This work provided the basis for the initiative’s conceptual framework for understanding individual behaviour in complex adaptive systems. Later, the conceptual framework was used to design a weather index insurance in Uganda, to support the development of mango value chains in Kenya, and to promote wider use of clean cookstoves in Kenya. The experience from each of the cases helped to refine the conceptual framework, which was later translated into a toolkit for behaviour-based development interventions. This feature gathers highlights from the initiative’s work, including a brief about the toolkit and examples of its use.
Duration: 2015–2019
Main output: Behaviour-based toolkit
Region: East Africa
The world has spent more than US$3 trillion on development aid since the 1960s. These investments have achieved many successes, but challenges remain, with development “solutions” often failing to really solve the problems they set out to do. Clearly, there is a need for innovative solutions – but which are also feasible and scalable in terms of resources, capacities and the agendas of governments and development partners. We need tools that help us grasp why interventions work, and how they might be scaled up or replicated in new locations.
Service design is an approach for understanding people’s needs, motivations and behaviours as well as the context where they take place. It aims to create services or systems that meet the needs of the end-users. It has already been successfully applied in the design of public policy in Europe and North America, but hasn’t yet gained traction in international development. That is why we created our behaviour-based toolkit.
Our approach combines service design, complex adaptive systems thinking and behavioural science in a way that allows for effective and efficient design and implementation of development interventions in complex settings.
SEI brief / Learn about our new behaviour-based toolkit that can help development interventions tackle complex problems.
We tested this methodology in East Africa, in three very different situations: to design a weather index insurance product in Uganda, to support the development of mango value chains in Kenya, and to promote wider use of clean cookstoves, also in Kenya.
Of course, these are small-scale trials, and they need a wider application to prove their worth. However, already at this early stage, the approach shows that service design can help us make sense of the complexity surrounding development interventions. It offers a way to work side by side with people who the development solutions are for. With this approach, we can deliver what international development projects aim for: solutions that work because they are context-specific yet scalable and because they are grounded in reality by design.
Perspective / Weather-index insurance can shield smallholder farmers from climate-related disasters, but it's mainly the wealthy who can afford it. How to change that?
Feature / A research project on mango farming found that technological solutions are not always suitable – especially when they attempt to solve the wrong problem.
Press release / The World Health Organization estimates that millions of people die every year from lung and heart disease caused by cooking with solid fuels.
Feature / If environmental crisis is caused by people, then people are the solution. How can we trigger change? Insights from behavioural science provide clues.
Perspective / How can we innovate at scale while tailoring to the unique features of every community? You can do it with our new behaviour-based approach.
Feature / Kalenge, a village northwest of Tanzania, is unelectrified; its households have no connections to a central or local power grid.
Perspective / In Mukuru, Kenya, people and policy-makers came together on stage to build understanding and generate solutions to air pollution in their local area.
Find all publications, features, perspectives and more in our content archive.
Initiative / This initiative examines what drives people to change their behaviour when it comes to technology adoption or change of daily practices.
Initiative / This initiative examines what drives people to change their behaviour when it comes to technology adoption or change of daily practices.
Feature / In Uganda, SEI is helping to develop a kind of insurance for smallholders that can shield them from climate shocks.
Journal article / This framework Integrates service design and behavioural insights to inform more robust development interventions.
Design and development by Soapbox.
