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| Dr. Yasmin Ali Haque, UNICEF, India |
Development practitioners, especially,
practitioners in social and behaviour change communication, are admonished to develop
and demonstrate trust in the decision-making abilities of the very communities
they work.
Also, practitioners have been encouraged
to promote through networking, exchange learning amongst each other, in order
to abate the failures of the past.
These were captured in an address
by Dr Yasmin Ali Haque, the UNICEF country representative for India, to
delegates at the National Conference on Social and Behaviour Change Communication
for the North Eastern Region, held between 8-10 August 2019 at Assam Don Bosco
University, India.
In her opinion, the
communities are not just waiting to be fed with information on what to do, but their
decision is a blend of life’s experiences.
“…never to assume that people are just sitting
there waiting to hear. They are using their life experiences…
“…we have to understand what drives
behaviour. We have to understand how we can channel that into our work. We have
to, not just give information, we have to give the logic. We have to trust peoples
decision-making abilities and our roles in it”
The role of the SBCC practitioner
she observed “is to look at how to provide the community with, not just the
information, but also, the rational. They shouldn’t just believe us. If anyone
told any of us something bluntly, do we believe it bluntly? We try to think
about it. We draw a narrow line between whatever knowledge we had. If it were
suspicious, we query it a bit more. And then, we adopt that behaviour. We try
it out to see how it works.”
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| Group picture of Delegates at the Conference |
Stressing further, she said; “behaviour
change communication, more than being an expert, you have to be a believer. You
have to believe people. You have to trust them. No matter where they live, what
level of society they come from; rich or poor, gender, caste…”
“…Unless we inherently believe
in people’s urgency, we respect their urgency; we respect the fact that they
make life decisions which can be extremely tough because of the meagre
resources they have, yet, they still make decisions that impact on their own lives…”
On this score, Dr Haque was
full of praise for Tezpur and Dibrugarh Universities, for leading the way in
mounting courses in Communication for Development; and Sanitation and Hygiene respectively,
which have helped to raise qualified practitioners to lead in the drive for
community-driven behaviour change initiatives within the region and beyond.
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