On the heels of the SBCC Summit in December, Agency for All and the Global Social Norms Learning Collaborative hosted an exciting two-day Mini Summit to take stock of collective progress, and assess goals over the next two to five years. With 28 expert participants from East and West Africa and Southeast Asia, the room was full of energy towards creating shared vision and common activities.

Agency for All’s Director of Social and Behavior Change, Charlotte Lapansky (Save the Children), opened the workshop:

“Social norms are an important scaffold in cultural context to people’ lives, and they’re essential to understanding agency. We want to understand how collective and individual agency intersect—will social norms be that glue?”

Joined by USAID and Agency for All Consortium partners, the group asked foundational questions about whose voice is at the table, and how evidence can be put into practice. They voted on priority actions for the Social Norm Learning Collaborative and future Agency for All Hub activities, and considered how we can better design both networks for capacity strengthening and research utilization.

We're currently recruiting for Regional Hub Coordinators based in West Africa, East Africa, Southeast Asia.

In November 2022, Agency for All consortium partners Sambodhi and Centre for Catalyzing Change (C3) organized a meeting to introduce researchers and implementers to social norms measurement, the concept of agency, and Agency for All’s goals to better define and measure these concepts within social and behavior change interventions—specifically, the design of an innovative implementation research project on respectful maternity care in India.

At last year’s International Conference on Family Planning in Thailand, Agency for All hosted an interactive workshop on the Addressing Reproductive Coercion in Health Settings (ARCHES) intervention called: “Preparing for Scale: Cross-Site Learning on Adaptation.” Organized by Agency for All consortium partner IPPF, our goal was to develop a new model for expansion, studying adaptation across Nigeria, Mexico, Bangladesh, and Kenya. This workshop set the stage for mapping a shared ARCHES pathway to change and beginning expansion with the end in mind.