Rethinking Community Connectivity

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Fostering social change and influencing human behaviour is a long, arduous process. The communities you want to impact might be remote. The lack of phone or internet connectivity might exacerbate the challenges of reaching them. The added difficulties caused by the COVID-19 pandemic may cause you to throw in the towel and focus on more attainable goals.

But efforts to effect social change through information access remain essential, as evidence suggests that the pervasive lack of this access presents a major obstacle to the betterment of poor and marginalised communities. This can be seen when communities remain unaware of the government programs intended to serve them, when their access to information is curtailed by non-functioning schools, or – as is the case with COVID-19 – when people do not have accurate information about how to keep themselves safe. Despite the challenges, there’s a growing movement of NGOs, governments and social enterprises that are focused on improving japan whatsapp number data people’s lives through information dissemination and behaviour change.



Digital vs. Physical Approaches to Information Access and Behaviour Change
Among these organisations is WeUnlearn, an NGO that aims to build emotional resilience and foster gender equity among children and adolescents by using research-backed gamification principles, a proprietary chatbot and other tools. In April 2021, over the course of a Stanford design challenge that lasted about four weeks, they brought a shift of 10-15% in the gender attitudes of children aged 14-18, from low-income families in Delhi. Their behaviour change efforts focused on 1,200 adolescents, and happened in a relatively short period of time. And since their intervention was delivered digitally, it would be quite easy to magnify that impact to 12,000 or 12 million lives.