Narrating Behavior Change: How Effective is Edutainment in Improving Aspirations, Social Norms and Educational Outcomes in Northern Nigeria?

Summary:

In northern Nigeria, low aspirations, adverse social norms and lack of information about the benefits of education help explain why over 50% of children, and particularly girls, do not attend primary school; and when they do, they do not learn as much as they should. The World Bank 2015 World Development Report highlighted entertainment-education story-based media with impact objectives as one potential tool for shifting social norms and promoting behavior change. To transform deep-seated views in traditional settings, researchers, behavior change practitioners and policymakers are combining edutainment with other behavioral-informed interventions. To better understand the potential for scaling these types of behavior change interventions, the Nigerian government, the World Bank research department, and Impact(Ed) International are partnering on an intervention-based study measuring the effectiveness of facilitated edutainment screenings, led by local female role models and endorsed by community leaders, in shifting social norms. Although the follow up survey for a cluster randomized control trial is to be collected in early 2020, an evaluation pilot was conducted in four communities in January 2019 (n=200). A 30 percent increase in enrollment rates in pilot communities forecasts the potential for successfully increasing school enrollments in treated and neighboring communities in the scaled-up intervention. Additionally, parents in the pilot reported increased confidence helping their children learn at home and improved support of girls' education and careers. Finally, this study highlights the importance of investing in pilot evaluations to refine both the interventions and their impact evaluations.

Background/Objectives:

Education is the foundation on which individuals and communities can build a brighter future, yet school enrollment rates and in-school learning in northern Nigeria, especially for girls, remain desperately low. While supply-side investments are common and well-studied, there is limited evidence for demand-side interventions. The World Bank's NIPEP project aims to investigate these interventions' potential by conducting an edutainment-based social norms campaign, targeted to 6-9-year-olds and their parents, and evaluating its impact on: enrollment/retention rates (by child gender); parents' aspirations, self-efficacy and attitudes toward's their children's education; and child learning outcomes.

Description of Intervention and/or Methods/Design:

During the pilot, parents and children attended two weekend community screenings involving three components, informed by behavioral insights: (1) exposing households to edutainment screenings of Impact(Ed)'s My Better World, a human-centered television series combining story-driven animation and real-life documentaries, encouraging life skills and the value of education and aiming to improve viewers' aspirations and self-efficacy, (2) having the community leader publicly endorse the value of education, in line with traditional values, leading to improved collective-efficacy and (3) showcasing strong role models with female-led sessions. In the scaled-up intervention, a cluster randomized control trial is being conducted in 120 school-catchment areas, where half were randomly assigned to treatment and control conditions. At baseline, 9,000 households were surveyed and tested, with the sample stratified to measure impacts by the child's gender. The six-month follow-up survey will be collected in early 2020.

Results/Lessons Learned:

The pilot results of this innovative, theory-based intervention are promising. Self-reported and administrative data suggests a 30 percent increase in enrollments. These increases are observed within and outside the boundaries of the treated communities, suggesting program spillovers to households who did not attend the community sessions. The pilot also observed improved confidence in parents' capacity to help their children learn and positive shifts in attitudes towards educational and career objectives for their daughters and other female relatives. While the pilot's results were encouraging, it was also important in refining the scaled-up intervention for success. The pilot provided the opportunity to understand initial reactions and tweak the edutainment content accordingly, opened a dialogue with community leaders on the best way to introduce the social norm according to traditional values and allowed local female-led facilitation groups to recommend the most culturally appropriate way to conduct community-based discussions.

Discussion/Implications for the Field:

This study reveals both immediate and long-term implications for the SBCC field. First, it highlights the importance of formative research when designing interventions and pilot evaluations to inform implementation at scale. This borrows from the tech industry's minimally viable product model in which products in development are introduced to customers for feedback and then tweaked before mass-production. In the long-term, this study (and others conducted by the World Bank) aims at validating the potential for edutainment-driven interventions to be scaled across social norms and contexts in order to drive positive shifts in knowledge and behavior change.

Abstract submitted by:

Regan Alsup - impact(ed)
Victor Orozco - World Bank