Learning from Five Norms Shifting Interventions Going to Scale

The slide doc, “Learning from Five Norms Shifting Interventions Going to Scale,” highlights top Passages lessons on scaling NSIs.  It represents the essential findings of a comparative analysis of five interventions:  Girls Holistic Development (Grandmother Project in Senegal), Growing Up GREAT! (Save the Children in DRC), Husbands’ Schools (UNFPA and SonGES in Niger), Masculinité, Famille, et Foi (Tearfund in DRC), and Terikunda Jékulu or TJ (IRH in Mali). As Passages began, there was (and still is) relatively little documented evidence on NGO experiences of scaling interventions that aim to shift community norms.  There were questions about how norms-shifting interventions could be scaled while maintaining core NSI norms-change mechanisms.  Passages comparative analysis of implementation and research findings contributes to growing evidence that it is possible to scale NSIs and achieve similar normative and behavioral shifts in new communities with new implementers.

Over six years, Passages partners, grounded in scale-up concepts and frameworks, documented and supported scale-up technically and evaluatively.  Intervention and IRH staff developed learning questions that guided small and large studies to answer a range of scale-up implementation questions and norms-shifting effects.  They explored expansion, institutionalization, adaptation aims and achievements, and partnering strategies with Ministries, a Congregational network, and local services.  This slide doc showcase their work analyzing key wins, challenges, and lessons in planning and partnering for scale-up, supporting implementation by new scale-up partners, and the utility of using monitoring-evaluation-learning approaches and program theories of change to ensure common focus on normative and behavioral outcomes of scaling NSIs.