Client Profile
BRAC is one of the largest development organizations in the world, with over 100,000 employees worldwide. It strives to alleviate poverty through empowerment and create opportunities for the poor. BRAC works on many different fronts in order to combat issues of poverty: focusing on empowerment of women and farmers, grassroots organization, health, education, inclusive financial services, and self-sustainment. Over the last decade, the organization has extended its work beyond Bangladesh to 11 additional countries.
See all Development Advisory Team projects with BRAC
Definition of Problem
Behavioral change is a huge component of all of our activities. Started in 2013, the Material Development Unit (MDU) provides service and technical assistance for materials to the BRAC’s programs. In this regard, MDU follows a renowned strategic and communications `P’ process created by John Hopkins University. BRAC is well known for ceaselessly introducing new services and ideas to clients, and it is MDU’s responsibility to identify cost effective, sustainable, client-oriented tools.
While BRAC is well known for effective behavior change, it believes that there are some new ideas and directions that have been introduced to behavior change communications (BCC) that BRAC is missing now. BRAC is currently exploring human-centered design, but this is just the tip of the iceberg.
What are the different models or opportunities that BRAC can achieve? BRAC tries to create precise customer-oriented tools. What is the ideal process BRAC should try to leverage flow of mobile money users? Other projects include: helping female migrants reintegrate into their communities, motivating women experiencing domestic violence to seek services, etc. Many people at BRAC are unaware or skeptical of these new methods. BRAC wants to gather some evidence that will persuade BRAC’s leadership to help us get started, and give us some ideas about how to start.
BRAC would like the project team to help us understand:
- What are the common approaches to designing behavioral change interventions used by commercial companies or NGOs, especially with rural, poor clients?
- What are the existing case studies and persuasive examples of the application of these methods to development work (like BRAC)? It would be helpful to have some sense of the costs, impact, etc.
- What tools are out there to help us get started? What should BRAC try and how? (This could be especially focused on our work with mobile money adoption.)
Initial Steps and Options
- We have gathered a little knowledge from some notes and books, especially Nir Eyal’s Hooked. Suggest students take a look at this book or his other writings/videos.
- Look at BRAC’s website to learn more about what we do.
Definition of Success
We would like a report that catalogues: innovative methods, case studies, samples, and open-source tools. It would also be helpful to have a presentation geared towards senior management with recommendations.